San Vitale: The Church the New Street Buried
Why is it significant?
Stop at the railing on Via Nazionale and look down. Below you, at the bottom of a flight of steps, sits a small, plain church with a porch on ancient columns, as if the street had grown up around it and forgotten it was there. Which is exactly what happened.
Key Facts
| Place | San Vitale: The Church the New Street Buried |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Nazionale 194/b, 00184 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.89980, 12.49070 |
| Part of Walk | Rivals on the Quirinal: Bernini vs Borromini in Baroque Rome |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the railing on Via Nazionale and look down. Below you, at the bottom of a flight of steps, sits a small, plain church with a porch on ancient columns, as if the street had grown up around it and forgotten it was there. Which is exactly what happened.
San Vitale is one of the oldest churches on this side of Rome. A wealthy Roman woman called Vestina left money to build it, and Pope Innocent the First consecrated it around the year 401, while the western empire was still standing. For more than a thousand years it sat at ground level in a quiet valley between the Quirinal and the Viminal hills.
Then came 1870. The kings of Italy arrived, and their new capital needed a grand modern avenue from the railway station down to the heart of the old city. Via Nazionale was laid out across the valley on a raised level, with banks, hotels and a vast white exhibition palace. The old church stayed where it was, and suddenly found itself at the bottom of a hole. Popes gave way to kings at Piazza della Repubblica; here you can see what that looked like in stone.
Go down the steps and, if the door is open, step inside. The walls are painted, from around 1600, with scenes of martyrdom, but set in wide, calm landscapes of hills, rivers and little towns, as if the violence were happening far away in a dream. The reason is the next stop. In 1598 the church was handed to the Jesuits, and it was looked after by their novices, the young men training in the house of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale just up the hill. These paintings were part of their education, gentler cousins of the martyr cycles the Jesuits commissioned elsewhere in Rome.
So in one quiet, sunken nave you have the fifth century, the Counter-Reformation and the Kingdom of Italy, stacked on top of each other. Climb back up to Via Nazionale, cross it, and take the short streets uphill to the ridge of the Quirinal. On Via del Quirinale, a small oval church by Bernini is waiting, the last word in his duel with Borromini.