Ancient Rome Archives - The Patroclus

August 24, 2026August 24, 2026

Paleochristian Churches Part VII – Santo Stefano in Bologna

Welcome to the seventh article in this series about very old buildings. On your first sight of Santo Stefano it might not occur to you that it qualifies as “paleochristian” – it is in fact a complex of churches which date from various periods up to the 13^th Century. But at its heart you can still see part of a pagan Roman temple, which is very cool.

The complex is known locally as the Sette Chiese (seven churches) but I can only count four proper churches and a little chapel.

We like Bologna and have been there a few times, either as a destination in its own right to visit with friends, or as a convenient stopping point on a journey to or from points further north. I’ve visited Santo Stefano three times – the first time was a long time ago with a film camera loaded with slow film unsuitable for interior shots. The second time, the church was closed and I could only take pictures from the outside.

Santo Stefano exterior — Santo Stefano, exterior view from Piazza Santo Stefano. Contax G1 35mm film camera, Zeiss Planar 45mm lens. Fujichrome Velvia 50 film, scanned on a Nikon LS-9000ED film scanner (click to enlarge).

The third time, we could get in, but one of the main areas was undergoing a major restoration and was hidden by scaffolding. Being a history buff in Italy takes perseverance – I’ll try for a fourth visit at some stage.

Nonetheless I now have enough photographs, taken over about fifteen years, to illustrate an article, because it is quite a fascinating place. But telling a coherent story of all the churches over two millennia is a bit of a challenge – I’ll concentrate on the two oldest, and we’ll see how it goes.

Ancient Bologna

These buildings bear witness to a substantial part of Bologna’s history. To understand that, let’s have a bit of context.

Bologna sits where the northern side of the Apennines comes down to meet the valley of the Po. The fertile valley was a source of wealth, while the nearby hills would doubtless have been a refuge in time of war. That this was an obvious place for settlements is shown by the line of ancient cities that follow the edge of the mountains – Rimini, Forlì, Faenza, Imola, Bologna, Modena, Parma and Piacenza, among others. These towns also follow the line of the ancient Roman road called the Via Aemilia, but the mountains were there first.

Map of the southern Po Valley and the Apennines. Source: OpenStreetMap (click to enlarge).

Bologna has a history that goes back to the prehistoric Villanovan culture, which was replaced by (or became) the Etruscans. Then came the Celts, from whose language the name of Bologna ultimately derives. When all that dust finally settled, we are left with the thriving city of Bononia, part of the Roman imperium from 196 BC.

The Temple of Isis

In previous articles we’ve seen how the Romans had a tendency to adopt exotic eastern cults and allow them to coexist with their own pantheon. This worked very well until another eastern cult (Christianity) arrived and started demanding exclusivity. Anyway, one of those earlier cults was the Egyptian cult of Isis. Isis was a goddess who personified the feminine divine power over the natural world – probably identified with other female goddesses in the Roman pantheon. Later perhaps Isis was absorbed into the cult of the Virgin Mary, although there does not seem to be any hard evidence for this so it remains a matter for judgement, and scholarly disagreement.

One thing that is known is that Temples dedicated to Isis were supposed to be built where there was a source of pure water for ritual purposes. Along the edge of the Apennines there must have been a few of these, and it was in such a place in Bononia, sometime in the first century AD, that the adherents of the cult of Isis built a temple over a sacred spring.

At this point I will include a really useful infographic that is on display in Santo Stefano, which shows the evolution of the church complex over the centuries. We will be referring back to it several times – because it is pretty difficult to keep track of everything that happened in the history of this complex, and looking at the jumble of buildings from the outside, it is hard to make sense of it all. If you are reading this on a desktop device I recommend opening the graphic in a separate tab so you can refer to it.

Infographic of the evolution of Santo Stefano, from 80-1900 AD. Note that the letters d.C. stand for “dopo Cristo”, ie “after Christ”, or “Anno Domini”. (click to enlarge).

And here is another from the Santo Stefano Wikipedia page, showing the plan of the complex. It is by M. Violante and reproduced under the Creative Commons licence.

Santo Stefano planimetria — Plan of the complex. **Layout of the Basilica** 1-3. Church of the Crucifix 2. Crypt 4. Church of the Holy Sepulchre 5. Church of Saints Vitale and Agricola 6. Pilate’s courtyard 7. Church of the Trinity or the Martyrium, also called “Santa Croce”, containing the ancient Nativity 8. Cloister 9-10-11-12. Chapel of the Bandage (“Cappella della Benda”) and museum (click to enlarge).

The temple of Isis is at the top left of the infographic above, and you can see that it consists of a circular sanctuary inside a rectangular structure with a conventional classical entrance (of course this is a hypothetical reconstruction, but it is also an informed one, so let’s go with it).

It’s a bit hard, standing in Piazza Santo Stefano among all the elegant colonnades of modern Bologna, to try and imagine the pagan temple here. Was it even in the town, or outside it? I haven’t been able to find a clear description of where the town boundaries of Roman Bononia were, other than that the town was a lot smaller than medieval Bologna, so the Temple of Isis could have been just outside the walls. It is about 50 metres away from the modern Strada Maggiore, which was then part of the Via Aemilia, so it was next to the main road out of town.

Street map of Modern Bologna (source: OpenStreetMap) showing the relationship of Santo Stefano to the route of the Via Aemilia (highlighted). (Click to Enlarge).

What would it have looked like here, when the temple was new – say in around 100 AD? Before Christianity, Roman law prohibited burials inside city boundaries, so as with other towns, the main road out of Bononia was probably lined with monumental tombs belonging to wealthy families, and a few temples, of which this was one. Traffic on the Via Aemilia – military, governmental and commercial – would have been substantial. Away to the south would be the line of Apennine foothills, and round about, you would see – what? Perhaps market gardens and orchards, such as you still see in the southern Po Valley, except not on today’s industrial scale. The proprietors of those productive estates would have built comfortable villas, and while the labour back then was human rather than mechanical, the Second-Century landowners probably liked statues in their gardens as much as Italians still do in the 21^st.

Piazza Santo Stefano, looking south, with the church complex on the left. In ancient times this would have been the area in front of the Temple of Isis, probably just outside the town. Without the modern buildings, the Apennines would have been visible in the distance. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

Satyr — Bologna, Piazza Santo Stefano. A bust of the god Pan, but not an authentic survival from ancient Rome. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 56mm lens (click to enlarge).

The Church of Saints Vitale and Agricola

Let us now look at the first Christian church on the site, which was not built over the Temple of Isis, but next to it.

The first recorded Christian martyrs from Bologna, during the Diocletian persecution, were Saints Vitale and Agricola, slave and master respectively, who both converted to Christianity and were executed in the first decade of the 4^th Century. At some point in the 300s, after Constantine’s edict of toleration towards Christianity, a church dedicated to them was built alongside the Temple of Isis. It is number 5 in the plan view above, and the rectangular building to the left of the temple in the graphic.

Not much is known about the saints – they are first mentioned by St Ambrose of Milan, writing in the 390s. Ambrose recounts how the discovery of their remains in a Jewish cemetery outside the town led to their being reburied here, in a church built for the purpose.

SS Vitale & Agricola exterior — External view of the church of SS Vitale & Agricola. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

Inside, the first impression is of gloom – there is a little natural light high up, but lower down artificial light has been kept to a minimum.

SS Vitale & Agricola — Inside the Church of Saints Vitale and Agricola. The roof dates from the 15th-Century restoration, while the walls and pillars are from the 4th or 8th Centuries. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

Two sarcophagi containing the supposed remains on the martyrs are in the side apses. The photograph below shows that of St Vitale. The peacocks are a very typical early Christian motif (there was an ancient belief that peacocks’ flesh did not decay after death, hence they became associated with resurrection). The inscription reads “Most Blessed Martyr Vitale” and the date in Roman numerals is CCCLXXXII – 382, or possibly 383 with the final numeral obscured. Either way, the date is wrong because we are told that the remains were reburied in the church in 393. And in any case I believe that numbering years from the birth of Christ did not start until the 6th Century. So the sarcophagus could be from the time of building the church, but if so the date must have been added in a later century.

Sarcophagus of S Vitale — Sarcophagus of Saint Vitale. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 56mm lens (click to enlarge).

There are some other survivals from the building’s earliest period, including a small section of Roman mosaic floor, and some (to me) indecipherable graffiti of the same era. The architecture is a mix of styles – some column capitals clearly scavenged from older Roman structures, some from the late-Roman or Byzantine period, and some – almost 1930s-like in their brutal simplicity – are described in the information panel in the church as “Franco-Carolingian style”. If they do indeed date from the era of Charlemagne then there must have been a reconstruction of the church sometime after the displacement of Lombard rule by the Franks. That makes sense – Bologna was sacked and captured by the Lombards in 728, and recaptured by the Franks on behalf of the papacy in 774.

Graffiti — The graffiti. I could not make anything of it, and there is no description at the site. I have subsequently found references to it possibly being a motif depicting Jerusalem. The only thing people can agree on is that it is probably very old indeed. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 56mm lens (click to enlarge).

Byzantine and Roman capitals — The stylised acanthus motif on the capital in the centre is described as “Byzantine”, or late Roman. The stonework at the other end of the arch looks as if it has been scavenged from an earlier classical building. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 56mm lens (click to enlarge).

Carolingian capitals — These rather brutal-looking capitals, on brick columns, are described as “Carolingian”, ie dating from the rebuilding of the church in the late 700s. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 56mm lens (click to enlarge).

Having survived the end of the Western Empire, invasions and wars, this church faced its most implacable enemy in the 15^th Century in the person of Pope Eugenius IV. The story is that at some point around the year 1400 an ancient tomb was discovered in the church, bearing the name SYMON. Rumours spread that this was the real tomb of Simon Peter, which is to say St Peter the apostle, who was supposed to have been buried in Rome. Eugenius was understandably unhappy about this, not least because some of the lucrative pilgrim trade was being diverted from Rome to Bologna, and he ordered that the church roof be removed and the building filled with earth. It remained in this state for about seventy years, before being restored by Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II. I imagine that the Bolognese authorities were careful to maintain a discreet silence about the whole SYMON story after that.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Santo Sepolcro)

So what happened to the Temple of Isis? Well, obviously, at some point it ceased to be a pagan temple. The conventional date for the suppression of paganism is 392 AD, when the Emperor Theodosius I made temple worship, among other things, illegal. This temple might have fallen out of use before that, but it cannot have been later.

Only a couple of decades after 392, at some point in the early 400s, Bishop Petronius had a church built on the site of the temple. (Petronius, a local aristocrat, was later canonised and as St Petronius, is the patron saint of Bologna. The large church next to Piazza Maggiore is dedicated to him.)

The story goes that Petronius wanted the church to be a copy of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built not long before by Constantine. If you look at the infographic above, the illustration marked “393-450 d.C.” shows the new church – the two round buildings, next to SS Vitale and Agricola.

External view of Santo Sepolcro. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

It seems clear that the church was built on the remains of the Temple of Isis, because the circular structure incorporates seven ancient columns imported from Greece, albeit paired with brick columns for greater strength.

Internal view of Santo Sepolcro, showing the ancient temple columns paired with late-Roman brick columns for greater strength. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

How much of the existing church survives from the 400s is not clear. Around the year 900 the Carolingian empire had splintered, and various Frankish strongmen claimed the throne of Italy. History recognises a chap called Berengar I as the king, but one of his rivals brought in an army of Magyar mercenaries from what is now Hungary, and the ensuing conflict did a lot of damage in the Po Valley, including to this church, requiring a rebuilding around the year 1000.

In the centre is a curious structure – the information panel in the church describes it as an “edicola” or shrine. It takes the form of a sepulchre, with a pulpit built on top of it. Until as recently as the year 2000, the sepulchre held the bones of Petronius, minus the head which was in his titular church in the centre of Bologna. It was possible to crawl inside to worship the relics, but in 2000 the parts of the body were reunited in the other larger church, so the tomb is now empty.

Edicola in Santo Sepolcro — The “edicola” or shrine in Santo Sepolcro. On the pulpit are the symbols of the evangelists, and above the entrance to the tomb is a carving of Christ’s empty tomb with the angel, Mary Magdalene and the sleeping soldiers. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

Tomb of Petronius — The inscription reads “here lies the body of the glorious Saint Petronius, bishop and protector of Bologna”. Except it doesn’t any more, having been removed to the church of that name beside the Piazza Maggiore. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 56mm lens (click to enlarge).

A church this old is going to have some traditions associated with it. One, according to the Wikipedia page (citation needed!) is that pregnant women would walk around the church thirty-three times, stopping on each circuit to enter the tomb and pray. Another is that the prostitutes of Bologna would gather at the church on Easter Sunday in honour of Mary Magdelene, and recite a prayer that was never revealed to outsiders.

It is tempting to ascribe these feminine rituals as in some way invoking the memory of the pagan goddess once worshipped on this very spot – but that is extraordinarily unlikely. However amateur history bloggers are surely allowed, at least, to indulge themselves by enjoying the historical resonances.

Another feature of the church is a black marble column called the “Colonna della Flagellazione” or the Column of the Scourging. The information panel at the site rather carefully describes it as “commemorating” the column at which Christ was whipped, rather than being the actual one. I would not be at all surprised though if in the Middle Ages it was venerated as the actual column. Ancient Roman columns were fairly easy to come by, and I am aware of several churches that claimed to possess the original item. There is a particularly fine one in the Church of Santa Prassede in Rome.

The Other Churches in the Complex

The first church that you enter from the street is the Church of the Crucifix, so-called because over the altar is a prized painted crucifix dating from 1380. In the infographic above it is the large square building that first appears in the illustration dated 460-760 AD. Although the church dates from the Lombard period, it was heavily restored in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, so there is not a lot to excite the antiquarian.

Returning to the infographic, if you compare the illustrations from 450-760 and 760-830, you can see that the domed building opposite the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (apparently a baptistery) is replaced by a rather irregular building with three sections surrounding a little chapel. This is the Church of the Trinity, which dates from the 10^th Century, although it was rebuilt in the late 19^th Century in a sort of neo-Romanesque style which does retain some of the nobility of the original.

The Church of the Trinity. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

I’d like to end this by returning to the Church of the Sepulchre that was built over the Temple of Isis. You will recall that such temples needed to be built over a sacred spring. Now have another look at the picture of the interior. Set into the floor, to the right of the “edicola”, is a metal grate. Beneath that, still there after all those centuries, is the original sacred spring of Isis!

SS Vitale & Agricola interior — The interior of SS Vitale and Agricola, with the grate in the floor covering the original sacred spring of Isis. Fujifilm X-Pro 3 digital camera, 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

September 24, 2023April 23, 2026

A Walk to Porta Pia

Here is a brief photo essay featuring pictures taken on a walk through the inner Rome suburb of Nomentano to the Castel Pretorio, the Aurelian Walls and Porta Pia. The pictures didn’t really lend themselves to a unifying theme, so rather than trying to manufacture one I thought I would let the walk itself be the theme.

In August this year, at the national holiday of Ferragosto, I again stayed in Rome for a few nights on the basis that Rome is one of the few places in Italy where accommodation actually gets a bit cheaper during August; outside the historic centre the city is considerably emptier then. Last year we visited and I wrote about the origins of the holiday and a visit to the Milvian Bridge, site of one of the more momentous battles in history.

To the extent that I had any objectives other than staying in an air-conditioned hotel room, they were to take more photographs of paleochristian churches for future articles. Since then I have already published one on Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede featuring photos previously taken, and some taken on this visit. There will be at least one more to come.

Normally at this time of year the public transport in Rome is comparatively empty, but this year the authorities had decided to take advantage of the season to close one of the two Metro lines for maintenance, so the buses were rather crowded. Given that, one morning I looked at the map and decided that I could probably achieve some of my objectives on foot.

The map below shows the first part of my route. Because I was intending to take architectural photographs, sometimes indoors in low light, I took my heavy Fujifilm GFX 50R medium-format camera with me rather than the little Fujifilm X-Pro3, despite the extra discomfort.

I started at a favourite Sicilian bar in Nomentano, and after coffee and a pastry, set off down Via Catanzaro. One of the advantages of being in Rome during Ferragosto is that one can from time to time step into the street to compose a photograph without being immediately flattened by surging traffic, as would happen at any other time of year.

When I first realised that the word palazzo in Italian can mean “apartment block” as well as “palace”, it struck me as a bit odd, but looking at some examples in Rome one realises that it is not entirely inappropriate – the architects were clearly trying for that sort of effect.

The rococo palazzo in the picture below, in Via Morgagni, was very striking; it was apparently built in 1926. The inscription on the front – NON DOMO DOMINUS SED DOMINO DOMUS is a quotation from Cicero, meaning that it is not the house (or family) that confers honour on its head, but the behaviour and bearing of the head that brings honour to the house. I don’t know what the significance of the snails at the top is, but they are a nice touch.

I’ve recently discovered that this rather whimsical mixture of Baroque and Art Nouveau has its own name – Barocchetto Romano (the “Little Baroque of Rome”) and I rather like it.

One sees quite a lot of early 20^th-Century public artworks in Rome, and the tendency is to mentally label the more monumental examples as “fascist” art, because, well, fascists liked that sort of thing. And since public art is usually paid for by the state, it often appears in contexts associated with the ideology of the government of the day. But it is correlation rather than causation – sculptors in non-Fascist regimes like Jacob Epstein in Britain were producing public works in similar styles.

In Italy, one clue is to look at the dates on public inscriptions. If there is a date, followed by a smaller number with “A” and/or “EF” then they are saying “Year (Anno) X of the Fascist Era (Epoca Fascista)”. Once you know to look, it is actually rather surprising how often you still see this in Italy – there was nothing like the sort of comprehensive removal of reminders of Nazism that happened in Germany after the war.

Another clue is classical references in the architecture. Identification of the modern Fascist state with imperial Rome, right down to putting “SPQR” on the manhole covers, was ubiquitous.

Below is a building from 1925, the Dopolavoro of the Italian railway workers in Rome, on Via Bari.

Dopolavoro Ferroviario, built in 1925. Via Bari, Rome. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

What was a dopolavoro? Literally meaning “after work”, the dopolavori were social clubs for industrial and agricultural working people, and as elsewhere in Europe had their origins in the late 19^th Century. Some were created by trade unions, and many by so-called “mutual assistance societies”. With the advent of Fascism, the trade unions were banned and the independent societies were incorporated into state-controlled organisations. The dopolavori proliferated, though, because the Fascist government liked the idea of them. The movement continued after the war and these days if you go to the website of the Dopolavoro Ferroviario (DLF) you will find an organisation offering cultural opportunities and cut-price travel.

Continuing along Via Catania I saw to my left the wall of a large building of obvious ancient Roman construction. This was the Castra Praetoria, or in modern Italian, Castel Pretorio – a name familiar to me from the metro station of the same name, but actually the remains of the barracks of the famous Praetorian Guard.

The walls of Castra Praetoria (Castel Pretorio). Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

In Republican Rome, the title praetor was given to men serving as magistrates, or as commanders in the army. It is from the bodyguards of the latter that the Praetorian Guard was descended. In imperial times they were the elite corps of the army that protected the emperor, fought beside him in battle, and sometimes performed sensitive intelligence missions.

Over time they went from protecting the emperor to sometimes choosing him as well, starting with the famous occasion where they supposedly found Claudius hiding behind a curtain after the assassination of Caligula. They were the only troops permitted to carry weapons in Rome without special authority, and being known for their arrogant behaviour they were not popular in the city. Emperors needed to keep the Praetorians happy with generous bribes to retain their loyalty, but one of the occasions when they were completely faithful to their duty was their final act, when they fought alongside the emperor Maxentius on the losing side against Constantine at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. This was not, as later propaganda had it, the final triumph of Christianity over pagan persecution, because Maxentius had already promulgated an edict of toleration for Christianity (for which Constantine then took the credit). But it was the victory of one political faction over another, and Constantine took his revenge by disbanding the Praetorians and demolishing their headquarters.

Constantine didn’t demolish the Castel Pretorio completely, as it formed part of the Aurelian Walls of Rome, and I continued along Via Catania with those walls now to my left. The Aurelian Walls were built around 275 AD, after a long period of peace in which Romans did not feel threatened, and the city had spread far outside the original city walls of six centuries earlier. But the Vandal incursions into Italy of the 3^rd Century put an end to that complacency, and the Emperor Aurelian hastily commissioned the walls which bear his name.

In 275 the walls were probably not strong enough to withstand a determined siege. That wasn’t their original purpose, though – it was to deter hit-and-run raids by barbarians, and to allow troops to be deployed rapidly to the site of an attack from one of the many watchtowers. However a few decades later Maxentius raised the height of the walls to make them a serious defence against siege warfare. It is an interesting hypothetical to consider what might have happened if Maxentius had decided to retreat behind the walls instead of engaging Constantine’s army at the Milvian Bridge.

Around 1,800 years later, the walls are still in pretty good condition where they have not been demolished to let roads through. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. Obviously, the first is that the walls were built strongly to start with – brick outer layers may not seem all that resilient but when the space between is filled with concrete and rock the result is very tough. The second is that brick and concrete are not materials that lend themselves to be scavenged for re-use, as happened to so much stone, marble and bronze from ancient buildings.

But probably the most important reason is that on a regular basis the walls continued to be needed for defence, right up until the 1870s, so the city authorities would have tried to keep them well-maintained. Which brings me – both in the narrative and in terms of my actual location – to Porta Pia.

The city gate of Porta Pia, replacing an older gate which was too small, was erected in the 1560s in the reign of Pope Pius IV, from whom it took its name. It was designed by Michelangelo who offered three versions, but Pius did not want to spend a lot of money and chose the cheapest-looking of the three. Even then the external façade was not completed until the 1860s, on a neo-classical design which is supposedly faithful to Michelangelo’s intentions (we do not know because the original drawings have been lost). But the facade on the inside of the walls is authentic Michelangelo.

That’s all very well, but it isn’t the reason why every Italian schoolchild learns about the Porta Pia in history lessons. No, in 1870, the Porta Pia was where the army of the Kingdom of Italy forced its way into Rome. If you are not familiar with the history of the Risorgimento, that might have come as a bit of a surprise – the Italian army, capturing Rome?

When Italy united in 1861, the new Italian parliament, meeting in Turin, declared that Rome was to be the capital. But there was a problem: the Pope was Pius IX, of whom much had been expected by progressives on his accession as a comparatively young man. But he had grown increasingly reactionary as he grew older. He refused to recognise the Kingdom of Italy, denounced it as an abomination and told Italians that it was a serious sin to vote in national elections. He then spent the rest of his life sulking. Papal forces were quickly evicted from almost all the Papal States, but the Italian Army stopped at the walls of Rome. There were a couple of reasons for this. One was that it would not have been a good look to shed Italian blood in a conflict with the forces of the Catholic Church, a prospect which seriously troubled King Victor Emmanuel. But the main reason was that Rome was strongly garrisoned by mercenaries and foreign forces, most of which were provided by the French Emperor Napoleon III.

Over the decade or so following the establishment of the Italian state, various attempts were made to find a negotiated solution, but they almost always ended with Pius throwing a tantrum, leading to the point where, in 1870 and to the general surprise of theologians, he declared himself infallible. Papal infallibility only applied to doctrinal pronouncements, but on the other hand Pius obviously considered the legitimacy of the Italian state a matter of doctrine.

Everything changed with France’s impending defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, which saw the hurried withdrawal of French troops from Rome. Faced with the impossibility of defending the city, Pius still refused any kind of agreement, but privately let it be known that if the Italian forces were able to breach the city’s defences he would yield to force majeure. And those defences were, mostly, the Aurelian Walls.

In the event, the loss of life – although completely unnecessary – was not huge. On the 20^th of September 1870, after a pounding by artillery, a breach was opened just to the west of the Porta Pia, the Bersaglieri light infantry of the Italian army entered Rome, and after brief fighting, the Papal forces laid down their arms. Most, being foreign mercenaries, were repatriated, although the Swiss were allowed to remain in Papal service. At a subsequent plebiscite, the vote by Romans to become part of Italy was overwhelmingly in the majority, so while 19^th-Century plebiscites did not observe modern standards of integrity and transparency, it was probably a fair representation of public opinion.

But this was an armistice, not a formal peace. While the Pope and his administration were given the territory of the Vatican and certain other church properties, and afforded extravagant diplomatic courtesies by the Italian Government, they still did not formally recognise the Italian state, or concede the loss of their former territories in central Italy. Pius declared a mass excommunication of all the Italian forces involved in the military action.

In fact, the problem was not solved until 1929, when the new Italian Prime Minister Mussolini negotiated the “Lateran Treaty”. Meanwhile, many Italian towns renamed their principal streets and piazzas “XX Settembre” in commemoration of the capture of Rome.

Just outside the gate is a monument to the Bersaglieri – and we can actually call this one “fascist” because it was commissioned by Mussolini (whose brief military service in the First World War was in the Bersaglieri). Although the soldier on top is in a uniform from the First World War, he is charging straight at the gate. In case you missed the point, the gatehouse of Porta Pia itself now houses a museum of the Bersaglieri, and once inside the gate, the name of the street changes from Via Nomentana to Via XX Settembre.

Bersaglieri Monument — Bersaglieri monument. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

After the capture of Rome, the Bersaglieri were immediately celebrated as heroes, and, with the Alpini, they remain a much-loved symbol of the Italian Army. I’m not sure what the best translation of the name would be – perhaps “riflemen”, “marksmen” or more generically, “light infantry”. I read somewhere that Piedmont lacked the resources to maintain a standing force of light cavalry, so the requirement for a highly-mobile battlefield force was filled by the Bersaglieri, which is why, rather than marching, they do everything at a run. And very fine they look too with their ostrich-plumed hats.

From Porta Pia I continued south towards the Esquiline Hill, then to the Colosseum, past the Palatine Hill and the Circus Maximus, then up the Aventine Hill, ending at the Basilica of Santa Sabina and the Giardini degli Aranci, from which there are excellent views over the Tiber towards Trastevere and the Vatican. That will be the subject of a separate post. Edit: here is that post.

September 3, 2023March 27, 2026

Paleochristian Churches IV – Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede

Welcome to the fourth instalment in this series, in which we look at Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome’s most famous churches, and two smaller but very interesting ones nearby – Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede.

My interest in this subject is historical and secular rather than religious, but it is not possible to discuss European history in the first millennium without reference to the evolution and controversies of Christian doctrine. I try my best to consider these issues objectively, but hope not to offend the devout.

Esquilino — Map of the Esquiline district of Rome. Santa Maria Maggiore is at the centre-right, Santa Prassede immediately below, and Santa Pudenziana is at the upper left. (*Source: Google*, click to open in Google Maps)

Santa Maria Maggiore

On a spur of Rome’s Esquiline Hill, not far from the Termini railway station, is the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore – Saint Mary the Great. These days the word “basilica” means a church that has been granted special privileges by the Pope, but in ancient Rome a basilica was just a large public building, built to a standard pattern on a rectangular plan, with a large central hall and side aisles divided from the central area by rows of columns. Santa Maria Maggiore is a basilica in both senses.

One interesting point about the special status of Santa Maria Maggiore is that when you step into it you are no longer in Italy, in a jurisdictional sense. Under the terms of the Lateran Treaty of 1929, in which the Catholic Church finally recognised the existence of the Italian state, the basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St John Lateran remained little exclaves of Vatican City, analogous to the way that diplomatic premises are granted special status under international conventions. But my purpose here is to talk about the most ancient aspects of the building.

As is often the case, the exact origins of the building are a bit obscure, but it seems to have been built in the mid-400s on the site of another church which was about a century older. There is a legend about a miraculous summer fall of snow which indicated where the church should be built, but versions vary as to whether that refers to the older or the newer church.

What is known is that the central structure of the present church is that of the 5^th-Century building. The church has been repaired, modified and extended several times over the centuries, with the most dramatic change being the addition of the huge baroque façade in the 1740s. That, added to the late medieval campanile and the domes, has the result that on first sight it really does not look very ancient at all.

Santa Maria Maggiore from Via Carlo Alberto, not looking very ancient at all. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

But you have to look a bit closer. Unlike many of the terribly destructive modernisations of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, this 18^th-Century one left the 12^th-Century mosaics on the original façade intact. So while that’s not paleochristian but medieval, it’s a good start.

Before we examine the insides, let us consider the fact that the church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This doesn’t sound particularly unusual to us now, but in the mid-400s, it was. Why is that? The answer begins with the fact that the Council of Ephesus had just concluded.

Some of the – for me anyway – more tiresome aspects of the history of the early Christian era are the endless controversies over Christology – the nature of Christ. Was he human, or divine? Or did he have both human and divine agency? If so, was his divine agency separate from that of God’s? How could his human agency not have been tainted by original sin? And so on, and on, and on, literally for centuries. Attempts to resolve these questions by reasoning led to all sorts of abstruse doctrines with no explicit basis in scripture, including the Trinity, the immaculate conception of Mary and more, all of which just spawned additional disagreements. Well-meaning emperors, popes and patriarchs tried – when they were not active disputants themselves – to resolve the issues by convening councils, but those councils usually ended up with enraged clerics hurling anathemas at each other, and sometimes furniture.

One such council, and an important one, was the Council of Ephesus in 431 which was called by the Emperor Theodosius II. I’ll spare you the details of all the issues in dispute (although if you are interested there is a fairly comprehensive summary on Wikipedia) but one of the outcomes was that Mary was now officially designated Theotokos, or “Mother of God” and that led rapidly to her promotion to the important position she has since occupied in both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. The Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the first to be dedicated to the Virgin, was erected to commemorate this decision, which you will agree was a momentous one given the focus of intense veneration which she quickly became.

Now let us step inside. The first impression is of yet another large baroque church. There is an immense 16^th-Century gilded ceiling which is “over the top” figuratively as well as literally. There is a huge baldacchino (canopy) over the altar, and at the rear of the nave over the door is a mock Roman temple façade with columns and tympanum, papal crest and a couple of angels. Above the altar is a dome and arches with every available surface covered with baroque wedding-cake style decoration.

But look at the columns that line the nave – although the capitals are more recent, they are real ancient Roman columns, recycled either from the church that stood on the site before this one, or from an earlier pagan temple (maybe both).

Above the frieze is a series of 5^th-Century mosaic panels telling the story of Moses on the eastern side, and various other Old Testament stories on the western.

The Red Sea — The Egyptians are drowned in the Red Sea, Santa Maria Maggiore. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

I’m assuming this one depicts the Battle of Jericho. Santa Maria Maggiore. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

But the real glories of Santa Maria Maggiore are the 5^th-Century mosaics on the arch separating the nave from the apse, and the 13^th-Century mosaics in the apse itself. And they make a real contrast in Marian iconography.

Let’s do this backwards in time and look at the apse first. It is a magnificent example of a very conventional medieval image – Christ crowning His mother as Queen of Heaven. Christ has long dark hair and a beard. Mary wears her conventional shawl and outer blue cloak. Angels, saints, popes and cardinals are in attendance.

Now let us go back eight hundred years before that and look at what may be the earliest-surviving representations of Mary in western religious art, on the so-called triumphal arch. Remember, this was just after she had been proclaimed Mother of God by the Council of Ephesus. Here is a series of illustrations from the life of the Virgin – the annunciation, the nativity, and so on. But where is Mary? You would be forgiven for not noticing her at first – she’s not dressed in her normal blue cloak, but is the one dressed as an aristocratic lady from the late Roman period – complete with silk dress, necklace and tiara. Nor does she seem to have a halo, although, weirdly, Herod does. I think it would be more correct to refer to it as a “nimbus”, which again was characteristic of the era – not a symbol of divinity but one associated with emperors and kings.

Triumphal arch mosaic — Santa Maria Maggiore, detail of the triumphal arch, with the Annunciation at the top, Adoration of the Magi immediately below. In the Annunciation, Mary is said to be piously weaving a new veil for the temple. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

And look for the three kings who appear in the adoration of the magi on the left side of the arch, and before Herod on the right. With their brightly-coloured tights and their Phrygian caps, we’ve seen those guys before, in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, built about fifty years after Santa Maria Maggiore. I had thought that version of them was unique to Ravenna, but clearly it was a conventional representation at the time. This stuff is really fascinating to late-Roman history nerds like me. (Note: I’ve since discovered a third version of them, on the ancient cypress-wood doors of Santa Sabina. I have also seen a photograph of the base of the Obelisk of Theodosius in Istanbul, showing defeated and suppliant people – said to be Goths – wearing Phrygian caps like this.)

When we visited the church I was very pleased to see, as is often the case with the grand Roman basilicas, that the nave was empty of pews or chairs. This gives a sense of space and a much better idea of how the original must have felt (churches did not have seating until the late Middle Ages; before that you stayed standing or knelt on the floor).

Note: The original version of this article featured photographs of the arch mosaics taken with a high ISO and a short zoom lens and heavily cropped. The results were unsatisfactory and in October 2023 when I was next in Rome I took new ones with a longer lens with image stabilisation, which have replaced the earlier ones. It was still quite a challenge to process them.

Santa Pudenziana

The next church on our little itinerary is that of Santa Pudenziana, quite close by (see the map above). It is a very different sort of experience to Santa Maria Maggiore. The church is in a location described as the oldest place of Christian worship in Rome (although it is not the oldest surviving church building) and there seem to be reasonable grounds for making the claim. However the fabric of the building itself dates from the mid-4^th Century which still makes it very old indeed.

Pudenziana (Latin Pudentiana) and her sister Prassede (Latin Praxedis or Praxedes) are supposed to have been the daughters of an early Christian convert in Rome called Pudens. Pudens probably existed – St Paul sends a cheerio on his behalf in 2 Timothy 4:21. There is a suggestion from linguistic evidence that Pudentiana might not have been a real person, and that her existence has been wrongly inferred from the phrase domus Pudentiana, which could have meant the “house (or family) of Pudens”. Whether she was real or not, a tradition sprang up that Pudentiana and Praxedis went around collecting the blood of martyrs before being martyred themselves in due course.

The church is on the site of a 1^st-Century Roman house, so it is by no means implausible that the house was the home of a convert to Christianity (whom we may as well call Pudens) which in due course became an unofficial, then an official, place of worship.

Approaching the church of Santa Pudenziana from the street. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It is hard to get a good sense of the building as you approach it – it is surrounded by other buildings including hotels and apartment blocks, and sits some way below the current street level, showing how much higher the ground level is in Rome these days (you can see a video explaining this phenomenon here). When you do get to it you see an architectural mish-mash which visually owes more to medieval and 19^th Century renovations than to anything from the 4^th Century.

Inside it is initially a bit disappointing as well – plaster-covered arches and a baroque altarpiece do not convey any sense of antiquity.

There is a notionally 4^th-Century mosaic in the apse, showing Christ and the apostles and once described as the most beautiful in Rome, but it was heavily restored in the 16^th Century, losing much in the process. The background, featuring an idealised Jerusalem and, in the sky the symbols of the four evangelists, looks original, and some of the faces of the figures on the left may be.

The rest of the decoration in the church is mediocre stuff from the 16^th Century and later. I have to admit that the first time I visited here a few years ago I took a quick look around, sniffed disapprovingly at the redecorations, and quickly left.

But the evidence of the building’s antiquity is there in front of you – not in the decorations, but between them. Stuck unobtrusively between the plaster arches are the original Roman columns that support the nave, and – unusually for a redecorated church – the walls of the nave are the original unrendered Roman brickwork. At the top of the picture below you can see the herringbone pattern that is very characteristic of the era.

So, as it often turns out, it is worth pausing, looking carefully and thinking about what you see. You may then also reflect that during the weekly Sunday services (the church has been adopted by Rome’s Filipino community), the walls that look down on the congregation are the same ones that looked down on congregations over 1600 years ago.

Santa Prassede

The final church we are visiting today is on the other side of Santa Maria Maggiore and is dedicated to Pudenziana’s sister Praxedis/Prassede. I have not come across any explicit doubts about whether Prassede existed, as there are in her sister’s case, but by the same token I have not read of any evidence for her existence, other than tradition,

From the street, Santa Prassede is a bit unprepossessing. The first time we visited was an “are you sure this is the right place?” moment – but go inside, because you will be rewarded.

The church is later than the other two in this article, dating from the 700s, although there was a church on the same spot a couple of centuries earlier, and legend has it that the land was originally owned by the family of Pudens. It was commissioned by Pope Hadrian I to house the supposed bones of Prassede and Pudenziana. Shortly after it was built, around 820, the church was enlarged and redecorated on the instructions of Pope Paschal I, and it is these decorations on the arch and apse that – if you look past the inevitable baroque stuff lower down – make an overwhelming first impression.

Old Paschal wanted to make sure that he got the credit for this – under the both the triumphal arch and the apsidal arch you will see his monogram. And in the apse itself you will see him on the left of the group of figures surrounding Christ, holding a model of the church – since he was alive at the time of the depiction, by convention he is given a square halo. Either side of Christ, two female martyrs, presumably Prassede and Pudenziana, are being presented by Saints Peter and Paul. I don’t know who the saint on the far right is.

It’s a bit difficult to get a decent photograph of the apse mosaic from floor level, thanks to the ornate baroque baldacchino over the altar, so I had to take it in sections.

The church and its decorations are very impressive by 21^st-Century standards, but must have been breathtaking indeed in the 800s. Shortly after it was built it was visited by a couple of pilgrims from a distant northern land – King Æthelwulf of England and his young son, the future Alfred the Great. At a time when most buildings in England would have been made of timber, you can imagine the effect this must have had.

For me one of the highlights of the church is the little chapel of San Zeno, built by Paschal to contain the tomb of his mother Theodora. Inside it is covered in mosaics – not to the same standard as in the main church, but they are charming and intimate. A lady labelled as Theodora is presumably Paschal’s mother, and since she too has a square halo she must still have been alive at the time.

Santa Prassede, Cappella San Zeno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In the photographs above the lady on the left is Theodora, Paschal’s mother, followed by probably Santa Prassede. Then comes the Virgin Mary, by now (400 years after Santa Maria Maggiore) conventionally dressed in a blue cloak with her head covered. I don’t know who the saint on the right is – it could be Santa Pudenziana, but if it were one would expect her to be wearing a martyr’s crown like her sister.

Cappella San Zeno, ceiling mosaic. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Also in the church is part of an antique pillar of polished stone – said to be that to which Jesus was tied when scourged in front of Pilate. This was identified in situ by Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine. Helena made a trip to the Holy Land during which, in addition to the pillar, she also managed to identify pieces of wood from the True Cross, parts of Jesus’s crib and various other relics which sparked a lucrative trade in such things for the next millennium or so. She also confidently indicated various sites mentioned in scripture such as Golgotha, the location of the Last Supper, and so on.

Note, April 2025: Santa Maria Maggiore has received a good deal of publicity recently after the burial there of the late Pope Francis. Expect it to be very busy for a while.

June 30, 2023September 9, 2024

Paleochristian Churches II – A Return to Ravenna

More photography of the UNESCO sites in Ravenna, and an introduction to an intriguing lady – Galla Placidia.

Back in 2020 I posted this article on Ravenna at the Fall of the Empire and illustrated it with photographs I had taken in 2008. I won’t repeat too much of that content here, so I do recommend you have a look at that article if you are interested in the history of Ravenna, and how it came to contain so much extraordinary late-Roman art.

But for those who don’t want to, here is a very short version: Ravenna became the capital of the Western Roman Empire shortly before it fell. It was ruled by the Goths for a while, then retaken by the Eastern Empire, under the Emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius.

There are some new historical subjects covered in this post, so feel free to scroll past the photographic stuff.

Photography Stuff (feel free to skip)

Those 2008 photographs were taken with a Hasselblad 501C/M camera with a 120 rollfilm back, on slow ISO 50 Fujichrome Velvia film. When I got back to Australia I scanned the 6x6cm positives on a Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner. All of that presented some challenges, due mainly to the slow film in dark indoor settings. I needed to use exposures that were on the long side for hand-held photography (tripods are of course not permitted in the Ravenna UNESCO sites), which limited me to places where I could brace the camera, for example against a column. It also tended to produce colour casts, as Velvia is a film that was developed for outdoor light conditions.

Recently (June 2023) we revisited Ravenna, and this was an opportunity to re-take some of those photographs, and to take new ones in places where photography had been impossible last time due to the slow film and poor light. This time I took my Fujifilm GFX 50R medium-format digital camera, which gave me some advantages. One is that, unlike with a roll of film, one can change the ISO with every image, thus being able to shoot in low light. And while high ISO will produce electrical noise (a bit like grain in film, but in this case variation between adjacent pixels), the large sensor reduces the effect of that, simply by having smaller and more numerous pixels relative to the image size. I also used software called Topaz DeNoise AI to reduce the amount of noise further. In post-processing I was also better able to manage the colour balance.

All that being said, there are some very interesting historical things to talk about in this post, so let’s get started.

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

On your way into the Basilica of San Vitale, you pass a small rather nondescript building which might have passed for a public lavatory or electricity substation, had they had such things in the 420s. It is the “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia, although her body never lay here.

Mausoleo di Galla Placidia — The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In my earlier post on Ravenna I made a comment that a lot of the late emperors were gormless nonentities. That was a bit of a generalisation, but quite a few of them were. One of the stronger characters of this era, though, was not an emperor but the daughter of one, the half-sister of two others, the wife of a fourth and the mother of a fifth, in whose name she ruled the Western Empire as regent during his childhood. Her name was Galla Placidia.

Placidia’s father was the emperor Theodosius I, who was not gormless, He was the last to rule both the western and eastern halves of the empire, and did a creditable job militarily despite having been given a very challenging strategic environment to work in.

Born in Constantinople, as a young teenager Placidia was summoned to her father’s court in Mediolanum (Milan), shortly before his death.

On Theodosius’s death, the empire was divided in two and he was succeeded in the west by his son Honorius, who was definitely one of the gormless ones. Faced with a military situation as bad as that faced by his father, Honorius managed to make it worse by falling out with and then executing his most competent general, Stilicho. That left Alaric, king of the Goths, as the main military force in the West. Alaric could have ended up as Rome’s greatest ally and its saviour – all he wanted was land for his people and to command Rome’s armies, which on the evidence he would have done very well. But Honorius managed the relationship so badly that Alaric ended up as Rome’s implacable enemy.

Alaric invaded Italy and laid siege to Rome, where the eighteen-year-old Placidia was then living. Somehow – perhaps while trying to escape – she was captured by the Goths and kept as a hostage in their camp. Alaric then besieged Ravenna, where, during a truce for negotiations, Honorius treacherously ordered an attack. Alaric, clearly deciding that he had had enough, returned to Rome, where he captured and sacked the city. Then, loaded with booty and even more hostages – but still including Placidia – the Goths continued south, hoping to settle in Sicily.

That would have had momentous consequences for Italian history, but instead Alaric soon fell ill and died, and was replaced by his brother-in-law Athaulf (or Ataulf). Athaulf decided instead to leave Italy and led his army, hostages and all, into what is now France and Spain where in one of the more surprising developments in an age of surprises, Placidia married him.

Why? Was it a forced marriage? It does not appear so. Was she a headstrong young woman following her heart? Was it a negotiated arrangement between Athaulf and Honorius to create a dynastic link? It seems unlikely. Was she, as an emperor’s daughter, placing herself in a position of power? History is frustratingly silent, which of course has allowed some modern writers to project their own preferences onto that partly-blank canvas.

Placidia and Athaulf had a son, who died in infancy – another fascinating what-if, for what might have become of a child with Roman imperial and Gothic royal blood? Before long Athaulf himself was murdered, and after a period of turmoil she was lucky to survive, his widow was returned to Honorius under the terms of a treaty. Honorius forced her into a marriage with his general Constantius, who shortly after was raised to the status of co-emperor. Placidia bore him two children, a girl and a boy, but was soon widowed again.

In due course her son Valentinian was declared Emperor of the West, and Galla Placidia became regent until he came of age, ruling skilfully. Indeed she has been described as the last competent ruler of the Western Empire (Valentinian having inherited the gormless gene). Her daughter Honoria became notorious in her own right for opening a correspondence with Attila the Hun (and even possibly contemplating marriage with him).

In her later years Placidia was known for commissioning churches, and one of those, of course, was the little chapel in Ravenna, now known incorrectly as her mausoleum.

What is beyond doubt is that inside the modest exterior is a little jewel box. The ceiling is covered in stars with the symbols of the four evangelists in the corners, there is a youthful beardless Christ (typical of the 5^th Century) as a shepherd, and an image of St Lawrence, to whom the chapel was probably dedicated, with his gridiron.

St Lawrence, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It is not known who was buried there, but it certainly wasn’t her – she died and was buried in Rome. Nonetheless the medieval tradition that she was buried there was very strong. Someone even invented a story to explain the lack of her body in any of the sarcophagi – supposedly some children accidentally set fire to it! But the chapel definitely has a connection with her, and so we can think about her as we contemplate it.

Mausoluem of Galla Placidia — Christ as Shepherd, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

There is no artificial light, and very little light enters – the tiny windows are covered in sheets of translucent stone – alabaster, I read somewhere. It takes a while for your eyes to become accustomed to the darkness, and even pushing the GFX50R to ISO 12800 produced some very marginal images that required a lot of post-processing. But at least I got some photographs – it was far too dark for my ISO 50 Velvia film back in 2008.

Apparently there is archaeological evidence that the little chapel was once part of a larger complex of religious buildings associated with the imperial palace.

The Basilica of San Vitale

Emerging blinking into the sunlight, I had a brief conversation with the attendant who, it turned out, was a camera enthusiast and another Fuji user. From there it was a very short walk to San Vitale – built more than a hundred years after Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum.

I don’t propose to repeat everything I said in the original article but the very short version is that the building of the basilica was funded by a wealthy Ravennate starting in 526, by which time the Western Roman Empire had gone, never to be restored. It contains many extraordinary mosaics, but the two most important historically are one of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his retinue, and on the opposite wall one of the Empress Theodora, and hers.

San Vitale Justinian — San Vitale; Emperor Justinan and his retinue. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, colour balance and perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

We know that the bald chap is Bishop (later Saint) Maximianus, because it says so. It is also believed that the bearded fellow with the mod haircut to Justinian’s left is the great general Belisarius, hero of the first Gothic War. I have seen a few illustrations of Belisarius, doubtless all based on this mosaic, and they always manage to make him look a bit like Pete Townshend from The Who. According to the Wikipedia article, the wealthy Ravennate who funded the building of San Vitale – one Julius Argentarius – may appear as one of the courtiers in the Justinian mosaic. If that is true, then my bet, based on no research whatsoever, is that he is the thickset fellow with a five-o’-clock shadow between Justinian and Maximianus. I have also seen this described as a portrait of Justinian’s other general Narses, but find that a bit implausible, because Narses was a eunuch and unlikely to have a moustache.

San Vitale Theodora — San Vitale; Empress Theodora and her retinue. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, colour balance and perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

I can’t remember seeing anything that suggests identifications for Theodora’s attendants, but looking at them it seems likely that the two men and two women on either side of her are intended to be actual people, given the individuality of their portraits, while the ladies off to the right are all a bit generic.

Congratulations to Lou for noticing that on the hem of Theodora’s cloak you can see a version of the Three Kings from the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (see below). I had not noticed that before.

One thing that I hadn’t really thought through before was the chronology of the building of San Vitale relative to that of the Gothic Wars. When the building was commissioned, Ravenna (and indeed most of Italy) was ruled by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, albeit notionally as a fief of the Eastern Empire. By the time that the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora were created, the first Gothic War was over and direct imperial rule had been established in the form of the Exarchate of Ravenna. Justinian was now the actual rather than the nominal ruler, and it was all thanks to Belisarius, so it is no surprise to see them both commemorated in this way. Nor is it a surprise to see Theodora there as well, as she added quite a bit of steel to Justinian’s already fairly hardline regime.

Alas, the Goths revived under the leadership of Totila, and as I have described elsewhere, the Second Gothic War, along with a couple of natural disasters, saw the complete devastation and impoverishment of Italy.

Compared to my 2008 pictures, these show the advantages of having been shot with higher ISO, and better colour balancing.

Sant’Apollinare Nuovo

From San Vitale we walked to the great church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Again, I won’t repeat the full description in the earlier article but this large church, like San Vitale, was started under Ostrogothic rule and was probably attached to the palace of Theodoric. As such it contained various portraits of Theodoric and churchmen who, like the rest of the Goths, adhered to the Arian version of Christianity which was later suppressed as heretical by the Catholic Church (the argument was over just how human or divine Christ actually was). At that time the “heretical” portraits in Sant’Apollinare were covered over, although they missed a few bits.

The glory of Sant’Apollinare is the two long mosaics down either side of the nave. On one side a procession of female martyrs leads to an adoration of the magi, but this is nothing like the Three Kings we are used to from later ages. They are in extraordinary exotic garments, and by some accounts are actually dressed like contemporary Gothic nobles.

I had thought that this picture of the Three Kings with their fancy tights and their Phrygian caps was unique, but I was wrong, as I discovered on visits to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and the Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome.

On the other side is a procession of male martyrs, leading to an enthroned Christ. Leading the procession is St Martin of Tours, a vociferous opponent of Arianism, to whom the church was rededicated after the suppression of Arianism under Justinian. St Martin’s portrait must therefore have been added as part of the other redecorations, which explains his different costume. Of course we do not know the identity of the saint whose image was destroyed to make way for St Martin.

Sant'Apillinare Nuovo — Male Martyrs, St Martin of Tours, enthroned Christ. Sant’Apollinare Nuvo, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

One can only speculate how glorious the apse decoration behind the altar must have been, given that this was where they usually put the best bits. Apparently though this too was subject to redecoration under Justinian. But in any case the area was later disastrously redecorated in a 17^th-Century wedding-cake style, so we will never know.

The Neonian (Orthodox) Baptistery

This is one place we didn’t get to in 2008. There are two ancient baptisteries in Ravenna. One, featured in my earlier article, is the “Arian Baptistery” which was built by Theodoric for the use of his fellow Arians. The other, known as the Neonian (after a bishop Neon) or “Orthodox” Baptistery is about fifty years older, from the end of the 300s or beginning of the 400s. This makes it older even than Galla Placidia’s mausoleum, predating the fall of the Western Empire by seventy years or so.

Battistero Neoniano — Neonian Baptistery, Ravenna. It is the small hexagonal building to the right of the centre. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Inside, in the centre of the dome, is Christ being baptised. The River Jordan is represented as a sort of pagan river-god, and Christ himself is shown as youthful and blond, although bearded, unlike the clean-shaven Christ of the Arian Baptistery.

Around the dome are the twelve apostles, and beneath them are what look like classical buildings, with seats and tables, which in the case of the evangelists are bearing their gospels.

The quality of these depictions of the apostles is extraordinary, better even than the near-contemporary mosaics in the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza in Rome. It is dangerous to generalise about an era from the work of (presumably) a single artist, but based on what has survived, stuff as good as this would not be seen again for many hundreds of years.

The Chapel of Sant’Andrea

Our final visit was to the little chapel of Sant’Andrea, part of a complex of ancient buildings which is now the archiepiscopal museum. There is not as much information available as for the other Ravenna UNESCO sites, but I have found that it dates from the time of Ostrogothic rule in Ravenna. It was not however Arian. As I observed in my earlier post on Ravenna, the Goths were a tolerant lot and were happy to allow the orthodox Catholics to worship unmolested – a tolerance that Justinian’s regime obviously did not reciprocate when he took over again.

Like the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, it is very dark inside, so one has to push the ISO a bit, and do some corrective work in post-processing.

Cappello di Sant'Andrea — Chapel of Sant’Andrea, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The association with Saint Andrew is due to the fact that the saint’s alleged remains were relocated to Ravenna from Constantinople in the 6^th Century. Possession of such remains by a city was both prestigious and lucrative, so people went to a lot of trouble to acquire them, and if that failed, then a convenient miracle often occurred to reveal a substitute set.

Two things are memorable about this chapel. One is that Christ is represented dressed in late-Roman military costume (indeed at first I assumed the picture was of the Archangel Michael). The other is a ceiling covered in cheerful-looking birds. Birds are a feature of early Christian art, but these ones seem to have more character than most.

Cappella di Sant'Andrea — Chapel of Sant’Andrea, Ravenna, with Christ in military costume. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

January 18, 2023October 21, 2025

Paleochristian Churches (part one) – Santa Costanza and Sant’Agnese

The Mausoleum of Santa Costanza and the Church of Sant’Agnese are two remarkable buildings in Rome, giving visitors insights into the late imperial and early post-imperial eras. This post is the first of a series I have in mind, concentrating on some of the oldest surviving Christian buildings. (Note: you can click on the “Paleochristian” tag at the bottom of the article to see others in this series.)

Although I write about these things from a firmly secular-historical point of view, I find the subject matter causes some algorithms to group my posts with genuinely religious articles, and this series will only make that more likely. So if you have come across this by that route then I apologise, but hope you like the pictures anyway.

I enjoy visiting so-called “paleochristian” churches, for all sorts of reasons. The term, meaning simply “old Christian” is a bit elastic, but it obviously includes anything built in the late imperial period, and ends – well, sometime after that, but certainly well before the end of the first millennium AD. So the magnificent 5^th and 6^th-Century buildings in Ravenna like San Vitale and the Arian Baptistry which I talked about in my post on Ravenna at the Fall of the Empire can probably be included.

What’s the attraction? Well firstly, if you are interested in the late Roman and early medieval periods, then any survival from those times is going to be worth a look, because frankly there isn’t all that much still around, and what there is will almost always be religious.

I suppose one of the main attractions is the sheer implausibility of the survival of these buildings. After all, the immediate post-Roman period saw some intensely destructive wars. However even without warfare, the general impoverishment of Italy and the decline of government administration meant that routine maintenance of public buildings almost certainly ceased. Even without earthquakes, some would just have fallen to bits.

Others were wantonly destroyed. As ancient Roman engineering knowledge faded away, old buildings tended to be seen as a source of materials for scavenging, rather than something to be preserved. Being a consecrated church was some protection against such a fate, albeit not a perfect one.

Even if the main structure survived, subsequent generations sometimes destroyed the original interiors and exteriors. They may have censored artwork that was no longer considered theologically correct, as in the case of some of the Arian mosaics in Ravenna. More often it was simply that they felt like redecorating. This, alas, was the case for a great many churches in Rome in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. So, for example, tourists visiting the mighty basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (to be the subject of a later post) will be greeted by the huge Baroque façade, and will need to look past a great deal of later stuff to see the magnificent 5^th-Century mosaics on the triumphal arch.

In architecture as in bird-watching, comparative rarity definitely adds to the thrill of discovery.

The Mausoleum of Santa Costanza

We will start, appropriately, in Rome, and with a building whose claims to antiquity are beyond argument. This is because it is a mausoleum probably built to house the tomb of one of the daughters of Constantine, the Emperor who took the credit for ceasing the persecution of Christianity and setting it on the way to becoming the established religion (it may actually have been his predecessor and rival Maxentius, but either way, Constantine made sure he got the credit). That dates it to the 350s or thereabouts.

Constantine may or may not have formally converted to Christianity, but his formidable mother Helena and his two daughters definitely did. Constantine’s daughters – Constantina and another Helena – were both buried in this building, in magnificent porphyry sarcophagi that are now in the Vatican museum. There is a very plausible theory that the mausoleum was actually built for the younger sister Helena, who was married to the emperor Julian the Apostate, but tradition gives it to her sister Constantina, subsequently Italianised as Costanza.

It’s not clear that this particular Costanza was ever a canonised saint. Indeed contemporary accounts talk of a rather violent, vindictive and highly political person, whose second marriage was to the eastern sub-Emperor Gallus – not really saint material. It seems likely to me that at some stage she was conflated with another Costanza who was a 1^st-Century martyr. The saintly virgin martyr and the tough-cookie empress were merged and a completely ahistorical life story was confected to suit this new hybrid character. If you do an online search for “Saint Constance” you will find modern documents referring to a pious unmarried virgin who was the daughter of the emperor and was cured of leprosy by a miracle. Obviously not true.

Be all that as it may, the building is well worth a visit. It is in the inner northern suburb called Nomentano, not far outside the Aurelian Walls of Rome, so in the 4^th Century probably a settled area of villas and market gardens but with enough open land available to build this sort of thing. Roman law banned burials inside the walls, so it is in places like this that one sees classical tombs like those which line the Via Appia, and where Christian catacombs may be found, as we shall see later.

The Mausoleum is a fairly short walk from the Sant’Agnese/Annibaliano metro station. You can just walk in off the Via Nomentana, and suddenly you have left the roar and bustle of modern Rome and entered a quiet place that has been sleeping for 1700-odd years. If you have enough coins in your pocket and the meter is actually working, you can turn on lights to illuminate the interior. We have been there several times over the years, and each time we were struck by how few other visitors there were.

Location of Santa Costanza — Location of the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza (source: Google Maps)

Like many of the most ancient Christian buildings it is circular, rather than having the cross-shaped plan adopted in the Middle Ages. Its construction is concrete faced with brick, and in turn the bricks were apparently once covered with coloured stone, now lost. So it was probably quite imposing. The central area has a high dome, once covered in mosaics but unfortunately now decorated with a mediocre fresco from what looks like the 17^th or 18^th Century.

The real highlights are the mosaics covering the ceiling of the circular ambulatory vault which surrounds the central area. These are quite secular in their themes, suggesting that the mausoleum was not originally intended as a church, even though it was later consecrated. Indeed, several have a bucolic theme, with birds, flowers and fruit, amphorae of oil or wine, and a slightly bacchanalian one with grape vines, and cherubs gathering and pressing the grapes.

The panel shown below is interesting in that it contains pagan imagery, albeit by that stage perhaps considered decorative motifs rather than religious ones. The style is apparently characteristic of decorations in imperial palaces of the day, so quite appropriate for the daughter of one emperor and the wife of another. Nevertheless it shows that the later institutionalised hostility to pagan symbols (we call it “cancelling” today) was still some way off.

There are some Christian images: the lost mosaic inside the dome was apparently of biblical scenes, and around the ambulatory there are a couple of apses, with mosaics in a different style and perhaps of poorer quality than the secular ones. One shows “Christos Pantokrator”, or “Christ the ruler of all”. The other, below, shows a youthful, blond Christ giving a scroll representing divine law to Saints Peter and Paul.

It’s fascinating to see how some of the Christian iconography with which we are familiar from the Middle Ages and Renaissance had not yet become entrenched. Early representations of Christ often show him young, blond and sometimes clean-shaven. On the other hand the traditional representations of St Peter as white-haired and bearded, and St Paul as dark-haired and balding, as here, are very ancient.

Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura

If you leave the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza and look to your left, you will see what looks like a park with some old walls sticking up out of the earth. The old walls are in fact the remains of a large basilica dedicated to Saint Agnes (Sant’Agnese), which predated the Mausoleum. Agnes is a saint whose martyrdom (with various miraculous embellishments) was said to have occurred during the Diocletian persecutions at the end of the 3^rd Century. There was a catacomb here where Agnes was buried, and her cult quickly led to the building of the basilica, to which her supposed remains were transferred. In those early days “basilica” didn’t have its later meaning of a dedicated religious building, but was simply a large public building.

Basilica of Sant'Agnese — The ruined Basilica of Sant’Agnese, Rome. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

As I said earlier, in the post-imperial period sometimes buildings just fell to bits through neglect, and it seems that this is what happened to the original basilica of Sant’Agnese. So in the 7^th Century Pope Honorius decided to replace the old basilica with a new church a short distance away. It is that which now stands beside the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza, and which holds the supposed bones of the Saint. The church is called Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura (St Agnes Outside the Walls), which serves to distinguish it from the famous church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, the large (now very much baroque-style) church on the western side of the Piazza Navona in central Rome, built over the traditional site of the saint’s martyrdom.

The approach to the church is through a pretty little garden, then down a long set of stairs, showing how the ground level has risen over the centuries. Lining the stairs is a display of fragments of funerary inscriptions from the site of the old basilica and the catacombs.

Sant'Agnese — Funerary inscriptions, Church of Sant’Agnese, Rome. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Once inside the church the layout is fairly conventional, with a nave, transepts and apse, suggesting that by the 600s the basic plan for churches had settled down. And as you will see in the photographs below, there is a good deal of decoration that is much more recent than the 7^th Century, including the ceiling, the mosaic above the apse, and the canopy over the altar (ciborium, or baldacchino).

In fact the only major feature still in original 7^th Century condition is the apse mosaic behind the altar, which shows Saint Agnes flanked by Pope Honorius (holding a model of the church) and another pope whose identity I have not been able to find. Since it dates from his time, we may suppose that the picture of Honorius is a likeness. Honorius is mostly known now for his unsuccessful attempts to resolve the long-running controversies about the nature of Christ, and whether Christ had separate divine and human energies. His efforts earned him little gratitude.

Agnes was a particularly popular saint, whose portfolios included being the patron of young girls. One of the traditions associated with her is that a young girl who prayed to St Agnes on the eve of her feast day would dream of her future husband. This is the subject of one of Keats’s finest poems, The Eve of St Agnes.

Due to her association with innocence and virginity – and also, one suspects, to a coincidental Latin pun on her name (agnus meaning “lamb”) – Sant’Agnese is often shown accompanied by lambs. One tradition still celebrated at the church is that on her feast day, two lambs are brought there to be blessed by the Pope. When the lambs are later shorn, the wool is used to weave the pallia, white bands worn around the neck, which are presented to newly-appointed bishops.

The area which includes the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza, the church of Sant’Agnese, the archaeological remains of the basilica and – incongruously – the Sant’Agnese Tennis Club covers a large urban block, and you can still visit the catacombs underneath, although we have yet to do so.

The last couple of times we have visited, it was noisy, chaotic and very hot outside. Inside both buildings it was cool and quiet, and the pagan deities and Christian saints looked down benignly on the few visitors that had found their way into the shadows, just as they would have done for over fourteen hundred years.

January 31, 2020June 30, 2026

Ravenna at the Fall of the Empire

Ravenna contains some breathtakingly beautiful art and architecture, miraculous survivals of a fascinating period in Italian history – fifteen hundred years ago – of which relatively few artistic and architectural records remain elsewhere. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. For a while it was the capital of the Western Roman Empire, so if my previous post was not historical enough, this one should redress the balance.

Ravenna San Vitale — Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

The Place

Ravenna is on the Adriatic, near the mouth of the Po. Just north of Rimini, it was on a major military route in antiquity. Not far away is the little river Rubicon which marked the boundary past which a Roman General could not approach Rome without Senate permission. When Caesar defied the senate and crossed the Rubicon, he remarked that the “die is cast” (alea iacta est). Ravenna was an important port, and shortly after he defeated Mark Antony and became emperor, Augustus built a separate military port in Classis (modern Classe), a mile or so to the south, from which Rome could project power into the northern Adriatic.

Over the centuries, silting of the northern Adriatic has moved the coastline a few kilometres east, where a modern industrial area has grown up. The port of Ravenna was a target for allied bombing in World War 2, and while some of the irreplaceable cultural sites in the old city were damaged or destroyed, it may be that the displacement of the coastline and the growth of the new town is what saved the others.

Capital of a Declining Empire

How did Ravenna come to be the capital? By the end of the 4^th Century, the Western Empire was at a tipping-point into terminal decline – economic, military and political. The frontiers were coming under pressure from increasing populations of “barbarians” – populations on whom Rome was becoming ever more dependent as a source of men for its armies. As agricultural productivity started to fall, the spread of a nasty new strain of malaria from Africa exacerbated the problem in the south, and the effects would eventually be felt through every tier of the economy.

The Eastern Empire, ruled from Constantinople, was where the action was. That left the West as the domain of the also-rans, and it showed. Most of the emperors of the West in the later 4^th Century were either gormless nonentities increasingly dependent on military strongmen, or the strongmen themselves overthrowing each other in regular coups d’état. They didn’t even spend much time in Rome – for much of the 4^th Century the effective capital of the West was Mediolanum (modern Milan).

Then in 402, after the Visigoths besieged Milan, the Emperor Honorius moved the seat of government down the Po Valley to Ravenna. The perceived advantages of the move were all military – the marshes surrounding it to the west should have been a defence against land attack. Since none of the barbarian nations had a navy worth the name, the military port at Classe would guarantee open supply lines to the Eastern Empire, and the Via Flaminia was an overland military route to Rome.

Goths and Arians

But the Western Empire had only 75 years or so to live. Rome was sacked by the Vandals in 410 (they simply bypassed Ravenna on their way south). In 476 the last western emperor – the derisively-nicknamed Romulus Augustulus (the little Augustus) – was deposed by one of his generals, the German Oadacer, who styled himself not Emperor, but King of Italy. Traditionally, historians like Gibbon marked this moment as the fall of the Empire. In fact, and to the extent that anyone in Italy at the time cared, the Western Empire was subsumed into the Eastern, and Oadacer, it seems, was careful to acknowledge the authority of the Emperor in Constantinople even though he was effectively independent. But the eastern Emperor Zeno cared, and he encouraged Theodoric, the Byzantine-educated leader of the Ostrogoths, to invade Italy and overthrow Oadacer in his turn. After inflicting a number of defeats on Oadacer’s forces across Northern Italy as far as Milan, Theodoric met Oadacer in Ravenna in 493. There, at a ceremonial banquet, Theodoric drew his sword and killed Oadacer with a single blow. Ravenna was henceforth the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy.

Which was a pretty big deal, and a more definitive break with the past than the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, whatever Gibbon might have said. For all his barbarian origins, Oadacer had led what was more or less a military coup by Rome’s own forces. Theodoric, by contrast, led not just an army but a people, who, like the Lombards and Franks that followed, formed part of the mass movement of peoples that marked the end of the classical period, and fundamentally changed the genetic, linguistic and artistic development of Italy.

The Goths were Arian Christians, deemed heretics by the Catholic Church (the final schism between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox branches of Christianity lay in the future). As with many such religious disputes, there was no real disagreement over anything in the gospels, or the central Christian message of redemption. The clash instead was between the complex theological arguments which had been erected on that simple foundation. And no question was more vexed than that of Christology – the nature of Christ. Was the Son of the same substance as the Father and co-eternal with Him (the Catholic position), or like any son, did he have his own separate existence, albeit partly divine (the Arian position)? From the former comes the recondite doctrine of the Trinity, and the latter, perhaps because it required fewer intellectual gymnastics, seemed to appeal to the Goths. However they were a tolerant lot and even when they ran the place they didn’t really mind what the Latins and Greeks thought, especially as they probably didn’t really care what all the fuss was about.

Ravenna Arian Baptistry — Arian Baptistry in Ravenna. Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

There are two great architectural relics of this particular period in Ravenna. The first is the Arian Baptistry, an octagonal building with elaborate mosaic decorations. On the ceiling there is a representation of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan by St John the Baptist. To the modern eye, accustomed to conventional representations, there are some departures from the iconography to which we are accustomed. One is that Jesus is portrayed as a beardless youth. Another is that he is completely naked, rather than decorously draped. And the third is that the River Jordan is personified by a sort of pagan water spirit. (Edit: when I first published this post I speculated that these iconographic differences were “Arian” in character. However later we revisited Ravenna we saw the older Orthodox Baptistery and apart from the lack of a beard, it seems much the same.)

The second great relic from the Arian period is the Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo. This is a church built by Theodoric in the early 500s as his palace chapel. It is a large, light, airy building with a great deal of wonderful mosaic decoration – including a Virgin and Child and processions of male and female saints. But given the history of the place, there are two decorations worth particular attention. One is a depiction of the Three Kings approaching the Infant Christ, and their extraordinary costume – bright red Phrygian caps and elaborately-decorated trousers. I’ve seen the costumes described as “to emphasise their oriental origins”, but also, much more appealingly, as “Gothic dress”. If the latter, then this would be such a rare thing – an illustration of how Gothic noblemen looked, by contemporary craftsmen competent enough to do so accurately.

(Note, added in 2025: as I have written in subsequent posts on this site, I have found representations of the Magi in similar costumes, dating from the same period in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and the Basilica of Santa Sabina, both in Rome, so this illustration, while the best of the three, is not unique. I have also seen a photograph of the base of the Obelisk of Theodosius in Istanbul, showing defeated and suppliant people – described as Goths – wearing Phrygian caps like this. Whatever the answer – Goths or not – it shows that despite what modern teenagers might think, it shows that Goths did not wear black.

Ravenna Sant Apollinare Nuovo — We three Goths of Orient are, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss Sonnar 250mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

At the other end of the church, high up, are depictions of palace buildings, lined with arches. These arches once contained pictures of human figures, presumably Theodoric himself and other worthies. However at some later point, after the suppression of Arianism and possibly on the instructions of Pope Gregory the Great, the central arch was blanked out in gold, and the other arches were reworked with images of curtains, covering the figures in an attempt to remove them from history. It seems that the Catholics were less tolerant of the Arians than the Arians had been of them. But the craftsmen given the job were not terribly careful, and if you look carefully, in several places you can see the hands or fingers of the censored figures, like the spare foot of someone otherwise airbrushed out of a photograph of Stalin’s politburo.

Justinian and Theodora and the Exarchate

In 527 Justinian became Emperor in Constantinople. Probably the greatest emperor of the post-classical period, he came from humble origins in what is what is now Albania. Apart from a major codification of imperial law and an attempt to heal religious differences between Constantinople and Rome, for our purposes his principal achievement was the reconquest of Ostrogothic Italy.

Like many English-speaking readers, I first came across this bit of history in Robert Graves’s historical novel Count Belisarius, where we meet the noble and talented general of the title, the equally talented (but less romantic) general who followed him, the elderly eunuch Narses, and the Emperor Justinian and his Empress.

While Justinian was – to put it mildly – a strong personality, his choice of consort makes him look somewhat plain vanilla in comparison. The Empress Theodora was the daughter of a bear-trainer at the hippodrome, and as a young woman had been a performer in what might euphemistically be called a sort of cabaret. She added a distinct element of cruelty and ruthlessness to Justinian’s reign – and almost certainly was responsible for its longevity as well. Theodora was tailor-made to become one of Graves’s arch-villainesses, like Livia in I, Claudius. And as with Livia this is in part due to Graves’s desire to write as would a contemporary witness, and his use as a result of contemporary historians. In Theodora’s case the historian in question was Procopius (c.500-565) and he clearly hated both Justinian and Theodora, stopping at nothing if it would blacken their reputation. After quoting a particularly pornographic description by Procopius of one of the young Theodora’s theatrical routines, John Julius Norwich sums it up quite even-handedly, firstly by calling Procopius a “sanctimonious old hypocrite” who is clearly enjoying telling the tale, and secondly by observing that “Theodora was, as our grandparents might have put it, no better than she should have been. Whether she was more depraved than others of her sort is open to question.”

As a result of the campaigns of Belisarius and Narses, Ostrogothic Italy returned to Byzantine rule, and once again the choice of capital in the West fell on Ravenna, governed by an exarch or representative of the Emperor. But another invading people had arrived – the Lombards – and by the late 6^th Century they controlled considerably more Italian territory than did the Exarchate. Before long most of the Exarchate was absorbed into Lombard domains before they in their turn were conquered by the Franks.

During this tumultuous period, a rich citizen of Ravenna commissioned the building of the Basilica of San Vitale. It is a jewel-box of 6^th-Century architecture and decoration, and would be worth visiting just for that. But it contains two large mosaic panels, one of Justinian and his attendants, and one of Theodora and hers, completed in their lifetimes.

Justinian and attendants. Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

While it seems implausible that they actually sat for them, the individuality of these portraits, not just of the principals but of the other characters, and the force of personality they show, argues strongly that at some remove, they were based upon somebody’s actual observation of their subjects.

Theodora and attendants. Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. Hasselblad 500 C/M, Zeiss Planar 80mm lens, 6x6cm rollfilm back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

The bald chap standing next to Justinian and identified as “Maximianus” was Bishop of Ravenna at the time and it must therefore be considered a likeness. The bearded fellow with a pudding-basin haircut, standing immediately to the left of Justinian, is someone I have seen identified as Belisarius, although most writers do not do so. To look into their faces across a gap of 1500 years is extraordinary. And it must be said that Theodora does not look like someone in whose bad books you would want to be.

In 787, two hundred and sixty years later, the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne visited San Vitale, and looked upon the face of Justinian. You can tell that he was impressed, because he used San Vitale as a model for his new imperial chapel at Aachen. Not only that, but the chapel at Aachen re-uses some columns scavenged from the ruins of other buildings in Ravenna.

Classe

At around the same time as San Vitale was erected, in the military port of Classe a large church was built and dedicated by Maximianus to his predecessor Saint Apollinaris, the first bishop of Ravenna and Classe. The Church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, as it is called in Italian, now sits quietly some distance inland thanks to coastal silting, with no trace of the old port fortifications visible. Inside, the iconography is of the saint as a shepherd leading his flock.

The real genius of the artist was to place it all in beautiful green fields. It is a peaceful place to visit now, both outside and inside, and it must have been a peaceful place to sit when it was new, while outside empires fell and kingdoms rose.

A note on the photography

The best way to take photographs of things high up on walls is to get the building owners to let you build a scaffold to raise the camera to the same height as the subject. And you should use bright white photographic lighting to ensure you get true colour rendition.

Lacking the right sort of connections and equipment, I took all these from ground level and under the sort of tungsten lighting you normally get in these places. As a result they all had a “leaning backward” perspective and a strong yellow cast. I’ve tried to reduce both of these in Photoshop, by applying perspective correction and a slight blue filter.

Villas and Vistas in Tivoli

A while ago we took ourselves off for a short trip to Tivoli, just east of Rome. Tivoli is famous for the ornate Renaissance water gardens of the Villa d’Este – so famous as a place of refined pleasure that people everywhere appropriated the name. Hence the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, and various Tivoli theatres around the world. Apparently there is a suburb of Kingston, Jamaica called Tivoli Gardens which is ravaged by drugs and poverty, so the name didn’t always help.

Tivoli is one of the fortified towns on outlying hills at the base of the Apennines where the mountains run close to the coastal plain. They belonged to the various powerful Roman families in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and from time to time when a family’s fortunes were temporarily on the wane they would retreat to their town and put the fortifications to use defending against their rivals.

Much earlier, it was an independent Latin city in the early years of ancient Rome, and after its absorption into the Roman state it became a location where wealthy Roman families built villas.

Today, Tivoli is administratively and culturally part of greater metropolitan Rome. So the food is good and the traffic is crazy.

The Villa d’Este

To start with the gardens, then. These are attached to a large Renaissance palace called the Villa d’Este. The d’Este family were rulers of Ferrara in the region of Emilia-Romagna, in northern Italy, quite a long way from Rome. The d’Estes and their close allies, the Gonzaga family of Mantua, always tried to ensure that at least one of their number held high office in the church, doubtless with an eye to influence in the Papal curia as their small states tried to maintain an uneasy semi-independence from Rome (which did them no good in the end, both states eventually being brought under direct Papal rule). To gain such advancement for their sons they dealt with the church more on a material than a spiritual basis, making monetary and military contributions as required.

The chap who built the Villa d’Este in Tivoli was Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. He was actually a grandchild of the Borgia pope Alexander VI, being the son of Alexander’s famous daughter Lucrezia Borgia, who married one of the d’Este dukes, and who apparently doesn’t deserve the infamy inflicted on her by history. Unlike her brother Cesare, who absolutely does. Anyway, young Ippolito was clearly a talented little fellow who was marked for future greatness, being appointed (purely on merit, of course) as Archbishop of Milan at the age of ten. Ippolito grew up to be enormously wealthy, a cardinal and a generous patron of the arts.

He was very keen to become Pope, but kept missing out. As it transpired, he was a man out of his time. Enormously rich cardinals leading Lucullan lifestyles had regularly been waved into the papacy in former generations, not least because of the huge bribes involved. But Ippolito’s misfortune was to be around during the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, and that sort of thing didn’t quite fit the zeitgeist. So after one of his failed attempts he was awarded a consolation prize in the form of the governorship of Tivoli, which ended up suiting him fairly well, although he kept nominating himself whenever there was a vacancy in the Holy See.

The visit begins in the Villa d’Este, through which most visitors sprint in order to get to the gardens, but if you want to see inside a 16th Century palace built and decorated by an extremely wealthy patron of the arts, this is the place for you. After descending a couple of floors and going through multiple frescoed rooms, you eventually emerge onto a terrace above the gardens, which descend down the side of a steep hill. Being at the foot of the Apennines, Tivoli has many rivers and springs and these were all harnessed by some very talented hydraulic engineers to feed an extraordinary number of fountains. After falling into disrepair in the 18th and 19th Centuries, most of the fountains have now been restored.

Tivoli Villa d'Este — Tivoli, Villa d’Este. The Rometta Fountain. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

Looking down at the gardens from the villa I noticed that several picturesque areas were fenced off, which initially seemed a bit disappointing until I realised that this was actually a good thing. This way there would at least be a few places that were not swarming with elderly tour groups and people waving selfie sticks. There was even a picnicking mother-and-daughter pair who parked themselves right in the middle of the view of the main fountain. And I’m ashamed to report that overhearing them later, I realised they were Australians. Sorry about that.

Villa d'Este — Tivoli, Villa d’Este: Fontana dell’Ovato. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

Time and again my attempts to get a decent picture were obstructed by couples grinning at their phones, or elegant young women making duck-faces while their obedient boyfriends took photos which would be critically reviewed, rejected, retaken, and resubmitted for approval. We even saw a young couple set their camera up and do a short dance routine. Presumably this will in due course be edited into a composite video taking in all the major tourist spots of Italy, and uploaded to YouTube. Fortunately in bright sunshine at ISO 100 you only need the narcissists to stay out of the way for 1/500 of a second at f/8.

After spending about an hour and a half in the villa and the gardens we made our way to a space above the main fountain where there is a hydraulic organ (meaning that air is forced through the pipes by water pressure) and which plays every two hours. The original seems to have been quite impressive with various mechanical effects, but having fallen apart long ago it was replaced this century by a completely new system which just plays music. However it does play actual Renaissance dance tunes by Susato and the like so one shouldn’t complain.

The Town

The town of Tivoli is pleasant enough, and occasionally one happens upon a view that seems strangely familiar. This is because Tivoli had a few ancient Roman remains lying about and was close enough to Rome to be visited frequently by 18th Century grand tourists. This in turn created a market for so-called veduta (or “view”) paintings and prints. The original veduta paintings were highly accurate representations of real scenes, like those of Venice by Canaletto. In places like Tivoli a distinct sub-genre emerged, which was of old ruins in romantic settings. Initially realistic, these quickly became even more romanticised at the expense of strict accuracy. You can see second-rate examples of such paintings by the score in provincial Italian museums in places where all the good stuff was pinched by Napoleon. A typical example might contain a ruined temple half-overgrown with ivy, with a broken column in front of it and in the foreground a lonely shepherd leaning on his staff, or a couple of blokes in tricorn hats, one gesturing with his stick to illustrate the vanity of human pride, or the transience of worldly glory, or something. This veduta genre was like statue-busking today; the first person to do it was very original, and most weren’t.

One such view of Tivoli can still be seen, and is where the Aniene river runs out of the Sabine Hills, down into a gorge and over a waterfall, past the remains of a Roman temple, variously described as “The Temple of the Sibyls” or “The Temple of Vesta”. Of course you have to mentally block out the hotels and bars in the frame, so you can see why the vedutisti painters took a few liberties.

Tivoli Temple of Vesta — Tivoli, Temple of Vesta (Temple of the Sibyls). Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

The Villa di Bruto (Villa of Brutus)

As I said, during the classical period wealthy Roman families built villas in Tivoli. Our B&B had the grandiose name of “Antica Villa di Bruto” meaning “Ancient Villa of Brutus” but we had taken that with a pinch of salt. When we checked in, the chap who ran the place asked if we were interested in seeing some of the Roman remains in the grounds. We said yes out of politeness, expecting to see a few stones in the olive grove out the front. The next morning we were shown around by the manager’s brother, whose wife is the owner of the property.

The archaeological remains are extensive – they include large cisterns on which the present house is built, and, down the hill under the olive grove, extensive rooms and galleries. Much remains underground, and cannot now be excavated without state approval. Of what has been excavated over the past couple of hundred years, there is evidence that frescoes and statuary have been illegally taken. The olive grove that sits over the bulk of the remains is also pretty ancient – the oldest trees have very wide and gnarled trunks and look as if they had been drawn by Arthur Rackham. Our host estimated that the oldest are six or seven hundred years old.

Villa Bruto — Ancient olive tree in the grounds of the VIlla Bruto, Nokia 6.1 smartphone camera (click to enlarge).

There seems to be some historical basis for believing that the Villa was owned by the Brutus family, of which Marcus Junius Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins, is the most famous. The attribution of the property to the Bruti is at least a couple of hundred years old as there is a fairly well-known print of the place dating from 1794 – doubtless drawn with the usual artistic license.

Villa di Bruto 1794 — “Villa di Bruto” as interpreted by the artist Albert Cristoph Dies in 1794 (click to enlarge).

The Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa)

About 5 kilometres down from the town of Tivoli, but before the hills descend fully to the coastal plain, there is a very large archaeological site called the Villa Adriana, which is the “villa” of the emperor Hadrian. I say “villa” in quotation marks because it covers about 80 hectares or 200 acres and was actually more like a small city. There were artificial lakes, fountains, temples, offices, baths and boulevards. There is an excellent model of the villa in the visitors’ centre and I include a photograph below. As you can see, it was a humble little place.

Villa Adriana Model — Model of the Villa Adriana, Nokia 6.1 smartphone camera (click to enlarge).

At a time when the standard treatment for a newly-discovered ancient marble statue was for it to be burnt for its lime content, it was actually a bit fortunate that the Villa Adriana started to be excavated when Ippolito d’Este was in charge, because he actually cared about antiquity, and was rich enough not to need the money to be had from recycling ancient remains.

Hadrian is of course known in the English-speaking world as the builder of Hadrian’s Wall (as defended by Parnesius in Puck of Pook’s Hill) but he was a prolific instigator of building projects all around the periphery of the empire. Unlike most of his predecessors, he often travelled to these remote provinces in person rather than taking reports from local officials. In doing so he appeared to apply a more consistent approach to the long-term defensibility of the Imperial borders.

Tivoli, Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa). Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

According to the sources quoted in Wikipedia, he was a keen architect himself and rated his own talents quite highly, so it seems more likely than not that the overall plan of the Villa Adriana, as well of the designs of the major buildings therein, bear his personal stamp.

The combination of the size of the villa and a surprisingly small number of visitors meant that it was less crowded than the Villa d’Este by a couple of orders of magnitude and we strolled around happily in the hot sun mostly by ourselves for a couple of hours.

I was speculating that the size of the place was due to the fact that when the Emperor was in residence, it would have been the de facto centre of government of the empire. So – a purpose-built place up in the hills, full of pretentious architecture and artificial lakes, populated by government officials who were forced to move there reluctantly from the real city. “Just like Canberra then” said Lou.

June 7, 2019June 16, 2026

Carsulae: On the Legions’ Road to Rimini

I’d been meaning to visit the ruins of the ancient town of Carsulae for almost a year. It is mentioned in all the historical guides to Umbria, and every time we drive up or down the E45 motorway we see the signs to it. After an unusually cold and wet May, last Friday finally promised some fine weather, and we determined to go there.

We (that is, Lou and I and you, gentle reader) had our last good look at the Via Flaminia where it passes through the gorge of the River Nera below the town of Narni, still called the Via Flaminia, but also the Strada Statale 3 (SS3), carrying heavy goods traffic. As I have said in other posts, this was the major Roman military road in central Italy. It was built in 220 BC during the consulship of Gaius Flaminius, from whom it took its name. It went north from Rome through Umbria and crossed the Apennines near Iguvium (modern Gubbio), finishing at Ariminum (Rimini). From there other roads led north, towards the frontiers of the empire.

‘When I left Rome for Lalage’s sake
By the Legions’ Road to Rimini,
She vowed her heart was mine to take
With me and my shield to Rimini—
(Till the Eagles flew from Rimini!)
And I’ve tramped Britain, and I’ve tramped Gaul,
And the Pontic shore where the snow-flakes fall
As white as the neck of Lalage—
(As cold as the heart of Lalage!)
And I’ve lost Britain, and I’ve lost Gaul,
And I’ve lost Rome, and worst of all,
I’ve lost Lalage!’

That is an excerpt from a marching song of the Roman legions – at least as imagined by Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill. It is overheard by the two children in the story as it is sung by Parnesius, the centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion – the Ulpia Victrix.

I’ve just done a bit of googling on these chapters of Puck of Pook’s Hill, and needless to say various po-faced modern scholars have written papers on the bits that Kipling got wrong – apparently he overstated the height of Hadrian’s Wall by several feet. But there is something about the books you read as a child that penetrates deeply, and when it dawned on me that the Via Flaminia was in fact the “Legions’ Road to Rimini” of my childhood, the memories came straight back. I realised that when I imagine a legion swinging along on the march – the tramp of sandalled feet, the sound of metal armour on leather, the smell of sweat and dust – it is not some academically impeccable history that created those impressions for me, but Kipling. And I’ve always remembered that a legion marched a set distance each day. As Parnesius explains to the children:

“A Legion’s pace is altogether different. It is a long, slow stride, that never varies from sunrise to sunset. “Rome’s Race—Rome’s Pace,” as the proverb says. Twenty-four miles in eight hours, neither more nor less. Head and spear up, shield on your back, cuirass-collar open one handsbreadth—and that’s how you take the Eagles through Britain.”

And through Italy too, of course.

The original route of the Via Flaminia led due north from Narni. Later, a more easterly alternative route was added which took in Interamna (Terni) and Spoletum (Spoleto), rejoining the original route a bit further north, but for now we will follow the original route. After crossing the plain of the lower Nera, the road starts to rise and runs over pleasant rolling country on the western side of the steep Martani Hills. There, about half a day’s march from Narni by Kipling’s reckoning, the legionaries would have come up a long hill and found themselves in the town of Carsulae. If it was on a warm day I hope that they got an early break and that there was some cool white wine available, made then as today from the local Grechetto grape variety – described by Pliny the Elder as “typical of the area”, and still available in the local supermarkets!

For much of this part of the Via Flaminia, it is followed closely or even covered over by modern roads such as the SS3 and the E45 motorway. It makes sense that they should all follow the same route in hilly country – after all, the topology imposes the same sort of constraints on modern engineers as it did on ancient ones.

However just before you get to Carsulae the old and new roads separate. The old road runs along by itself for a couple of kilometres through oak woods, and it is here that you can find the ruins of the old town.

Parking beside the modern road we walked to the archaeological site along a path through fields of young green barley, with poppies and wild orchids lining the path, and wild roses in the hedgerows.

It took some effort for me to try and mentally superimpose an image of bustling Roman Carsulae on what is now a sleepy rural scene. An oak wood has grown up within the northern boundary of the town, and a small flock of sheep and goats was grazing under the trees.

For me the best way to try and visualise it was to walk along the Via Flaminia as it goes through the middle of the town from south to north. You start by coming up a hill and then encounter the first ruins. If you turn around and look back down the hill, you are looking at the road from Rome.

Via Flaminia at Carsulae — Carsulae: looking back down the Via Flaminia in the direction of Narni and Rome. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

Turn around again, and up to the left there are the remains of baths, built over natural springs. Away to the right is some slightly more modern architecture – the church of Saints Cosmas and Damiano, built in early Christian times on the foundations of an existing building, then extended in the 11^th Century using material scavenged from elsewhere on the site. Passing that, we get to the site of the forum, on raised ground to the left. Parts of it, including the entry arch, have been re-erected, which purists might object to but I don’t mind.

Carsulae Forum — Carsulae: the Via Flaminia passes the entrance to the forum. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 40mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

Carsulae forum arch — Carsulae: looking east towards the amphitheatre from the forum. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

Continuing uphill along the road you can see the remains of a theatre and amphitheatre off to the right, and then the road runs into the oak wood. Looking down you can see that the paving stones in the road are grooved by chariot and cart wheels, as they are at Pompeii.

Carsulae Via Flaminia — Carsulae: the Via Flaminia with wheel ruts. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

The road starts to run downhill again and you reach the remains of a substantial town gate, beyond which the road bears left into more oak woods. This is where the northbound legions would have passed on their way to Rimini and beyond. I have no idea whether the land was wooded or cleared in ancient times, but in my imagination I saw the legionaries marching away through the gate into the cool shade of the wood, to be lost from view.

Carsulae town gate — Carsulae: northern town gate. Hasselblad 501 C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm CF lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge)

Carsulae was abandoned by the 5th Century. A book published in 1960 (TODI e i suoi castelli by Franco Mancini, still in print) reflects the traditional view that it was sacked by the Visigothic army of Alaric, but these days people are less certain. The Wikipedia article says that the reason is unknown, but that it could have been destroyed by an earthquake, or during the wars and invasions at the end of the Roman era, or that it may have become impoverished after road traffic dwindled. Signs at the site say that the town was abandoned because its position in relatively open country meant that it could not be defended in troubled times.

Note, added January 2022: I am currently reading Tim Parks’ latest book The Hero’s Way in which he and a companion walk the route taken by Garibaldi and his men after escaping from Rome in 1849. It turns out that they came through Carsulae, so while my mental image of the legionaries marching away into the wood might have been a bit fanciful, the oak trees were probably there in 1849. So Garibaldi would have ridden under that arch, and led his force off into the shadows.

Note, added June 2026: I have just published a three-part article covering the entire length of the Via Flaminia from Rome to Rimini. You can find the first part of the article here: Via Flaminia – All the Way (Part 1).

May 12, 2019September 21, 2024

The Garden of Livia Drusilla

I started writing this post in Rome, where I had to go and visit the Australian Embassy to cast a vote in the forthcoming federal election. We decided to make a trip of it and chose a place to stay in walking distance of the embassy, near the Piazza Bologna metro station.

On previous visits to Rome we have always stayed in the Centro Storico, but this time we had a car with us and we didn’t want to go anywhere near the dreaded Zona Traffico Limitato (ZTL) – the permit zone that can see hapless tourists cop several expensive fines within a few minutes as they desperately try and find a way out. We too have had the unpleasant experience of finding ourselves in a one-way street, surrounded by surging traffic, being swept inexorably into the ZTL. In that case we got away with it – maybe because it was during one of the short periods that the ZTL does not operate, or maybe the camera was not working. But I wouldn’t want to repeat it, so we chose somewhere at a safe distance.

The area near the Piazza Bologna is called Nomentana (named after a gate in the late Roman-era city wall) and turned out to be a cheerful bustling district with much to recommend it, not least a Sicilian cafe called Mizzica where we had a cheap but excellent breakfast both mornings, of coffee and Sicilian pastries. Learning to eat the latter without getting sticky sweet mascarpone all over my chin remains a work in progress. In the evening we went back for aperitivi and snacks, sitting at a table outside and watching the world go by.

A bit further away we tried a restaurant recommended to us by the hotel, called Hostaria “Al Monumento” da Giulio which promised typical Roman cuisine. Going by the presence of tripe on the menu, this was probably true, as Romans are great offal-eaters. There were however other options, and it being spring, I had Carciofi alla Giudia which is Jewish-style deep-fried artichoke. Lou had abbacchio which is roasted milk-fed lamb.

Being close to a metro station it was fairly simple to get into the centre of Rome, which was its usual self, heaving with tourists and touts. In the evenings, we found we preferred just hanging around Nomentana, where the voices around us were mostly speaking Italian, rather than – as they would have been in central Rome – Mandarin, Japanese, German, Dutch, or variants of English.

The next morning we travelled in to Termini to visit a nearby museum called Museo Romana Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. The terme in question are the baths of Diocletian, close by.

Rome, not surprisingly, has a lot of museums. I do my best, but I have to confess that my heart sinks a bit when we turn a corner and see yet another corridor lined with several dozen marble busts, all helpfully labelled either Portrait of a Man or Portrait of a Woman (gosh thanks, I would never have guessed). I usually manage to give the first few a conscientious examination, after which it all becomes increasingly cursory. Strange – if any one of them were the only surviving example, one would sit and stare at it for hours.

The reason we were going to this museum is that it offers more than statuary – it features mosaic floors and, even better, frescoed walls from various excavated buildings.

I always find it a bit miraculous when I see a surviving fresco from ancient times – plaster being inherently brittle and friable – but I must admit that when good conditions and good luck combine, the results can be startling, especially in the case of some Etruscan tombs.

One of the highlights of the museum is a set of restored frescoes recovered from a Roman villa near the site of the existing Villa Farnesina on the western bank of the Tiber between the Gianicolo and Trastevere areas of Rome. Then as now in a very desirable area, the villa may have been built by Octavius (later the Emperor Augustus) for his daughter Julia, and was abandoned at some point due to flooding from the river. It was buried and forgotten for centuries until rediscovered at the end of the 19^th Century when the modern river embankments were being built. The frescoes are displayed in representations of the original rooms.

I regret that the only photos taken in the museum were taken on our smartphones – museums in Rome usually insist on bags of any size going into a cloakroom and I was reluctant to risk my Hasselblad equipment in there, so I didn’t take it.

Museums in Rome - Fresco from the Villa Farnesina in the Museum Palazzo Massimo — Fresco from the ancient Villa Farnesina, with trompe-l’oeil effect. (click to enlarge)

Fresco from the Villa Farnesina in the Museum Palazzo Massimo — Is this a contemporary view of the the Tiber outside the villa? (click to enlarge)

Impressive as they are, those frescoes were not the high point of our visit to the Palazzo Massimo.

When I was at university two of my favourite books were I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. I remember devouring them when I should have been wading through my set texts. Graves’s story is not short of villains, but surely the worst is the evil, scheming, murdering Empress Livia, the wife of Augustus and grandmother of Claudius. Then a couple of years later we were treated to the superb BBC adaptation with Derek Jacobi in the title role, and many other brilliant actors. One of the best of them was Siân Phillips as Livia, who demonstrated the truth of the old theatrical adage that it is more fun to play villains than heroes.

Graves was a highly educated man who based his historical novels on classical sources – ancient historians like Suetonius who inevitably had their own axes to grind. Needless to say there are modern historians who advance plausible arguments as to why Livia probably wasn’t as bad as she is made out to be by those sources. One such article is here.

Of course historical fiction needs villains and heroes and it would not have made such a good story otherwise. I note that Graves’s other great villainess, the Empress Theodora from Count Belisarius, had a similarly bad rap from contemporary sources, but both she and Livia still sound pretty scary. Theodora looks scary too, in the mosaic portrait from Ravenna. Something else for the list of future posts (edit: I have now posted on Ravenna and Theodora).

Livia Drusilla was a wealthy aristocrat and had property of her own before she married Augustus (her second husband), including a country villa. It was a few miles north of Rome on the Via Flaminia, on a hill looking back down the Tiber towards the city. The villa was rediscovered in the 16^th Century, but not recognised as the Villa of Livia and properly excavated until the 1860s. These days the site lies near the flyovers of the junction between the Rome Ring Road and the Strada Statale 3 (SS3), the latter still called – bless the Italian Ministry of Transport – the Via Flaminia.

One room, south-facing and thus probably intended for use in winter, was decorated with beautifully realistic frescoes of trees and birds. A fresh breeze agitates the leaves and birds fly to and fro. These frescoes, after cleaning and restoration, were moved to the Palazzo Massimo where they are on display in a room of the same size as the original. If there were nothing else in the museum, I would recommend you go there and see them. We will definitely go there again.

Museums in Rome - The garden of Livia — The garden of Livia (click to enlarge)

The garden of Livia: opposite wall (click to enlarge).

Not only are they beautiful, but it is almost certain that those actual frescoes were looked upon by Livia and Augustus. They could have strolled about in front of them discussing affairs of state. If you believe Graves’s depiction of Livia, she might have despatched her poisoners from there.

We got to the museum relatively early and had the luxury of a period alone in Livia’s garden, and a relatively undisturbed visit to the rest of the exhibits. Then, around mid-morning, that scourge of Italian museums arrived, in the form of several school groups. The younger children did at least seem to be partly listening to their teacher. The adolescents behaved as they always do – after fanning out to occupy every single seat in the place, they then stared at social media on their smartphones, while ignoring everything the teacher was saying. At least it keeps them quiet, I suppose. Doubtless when the time comes to write a report on their visit, they will use those same smartphones to share material cut and pasted from Wikipedia.

In my post on The Paradox of Old and New Italy I criticised the implicit attitude of Grand Tourists of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries that “Italy is wasted on the Italians”. Nevertheless, it is a bit depressing to see young people so determinedly impervious to their own culture. Hopefully it’s just a phase they are going through.

Update: we revisited the museum in August 2024 and I wrote a separate post on the subject.

Ancient Bologna

The Temple of Isis

The Church of Saints Vitale and Agricola

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Santo Sepolcro)

The Other Churches in the Complex

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Santa Maria Maggiore

Santa Pudenziana

Santa Prassede

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Photography Stuff (feel free to skip)

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

The Basilica of San Vitale

Sant’Apollinare Nuovo

The Neonian (Orthodox) Baptistery

The Chapel of Sant’Andrea

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The Mausoleum of Santa Costanza

Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura

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The Place

Capital of a Declining Empire

Goths and Arians

Justinian and Theodora and the Exarchate

Classe

A note on the photography

Further reading

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The Villa d’Este

The Town

The Villa di Bruto (Villa of Brutus)

The Villa Adriana (Hadrian’s Villa)

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