Santo Spirito in Sassia: The Wheel of the Foundlings
Why is it significant?
Look for the small opening set into the old hospital wall close to the church, where a revolving drum once turned. It looks like a hatch for deliveries.
Key Facts
| Place | Santo Spirito in Sassia: The Wheel of the Foundlings |
|---|---|
| Address | Borgo Santo Spirito 1, 00193 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90110, 12.46260 |
| Part of Walk | Pilgrims, Popes and Swiss Guards: Rome's Vatican and the Medieval Borgo |
| Generated | Generated |
Look for the small opening set into the old hospital wall close to the church, where a revolving drum once turned. It looks like a hatch for deliveries. For centuries it was the most heartbreaking door in Rome: a mother who could not keep her baby placed the child in the wheel, turned it, rang a bell, and walked away into the night, unseen.
The story behind it is a legend about Pope Innocent the Third. Around 1198, it says, fishermen told the pope that their nets were bringing up the bodies of newborn babies thrown into the Tiber. Shaken, he founded a hospital here, on the site of the old Saxon hostel, to take in the sick, the poor and abandoned children. The foundlings, it is said, were marked with a double cross, the emblem of the Holy Spirit, and raised by the institution.
Whatever the truth of the legend, the hospital is very real, and among the oldest in Europe. Pope Sixtus the Fourth rebuilt it in the 1470s around an enormous ward, the Corsia Sistina, well over a hundred metres long, its walls painted with scenes of the hospital's foundation. And it is still a working hospital today, just behind these walls.
The church took its present form in the 1540s, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, the architect of Palazzo Farnese, with its facade completed later in the century. Since 1994 it has been a sanctuary of the Divine Mercy, much visited by Polish pilgrims. But the words in Sassia keep the oldest memory of all: this was Saxon ground, the corner of Rome where Anglo-Saxon kings like Ine of Wessex are said to have come to end their days as pilgrims.
A hospital for the poorest, an English hostel, a hatch for unwanted babies... the Borgo was always about people arriving from far away with nothing. Now cross back to the great avenue that runs straight towards St Peter's, and stop at the church on its far side with a tall stone front and, oddly, no dome.