By Sarah Laing
A view of the San Clemente Basilica from the outside. | Photo by David Bramhall.
I would not normally consider myself a claustrophobic person, but I had a close encounter of the walls-closing-in kind on Monday.
After our visit to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury discourse with ponderous loquacity, Professor Stille, our resident Roman, led us all on an excursion to the church of San Clemente. After meandering down cobble stone streets in the shadow of the Coliseum it was a weird transition to enter the Medieval basilica.
It was dim, as many of these churches are, lit seemingly by the dull glitter of the mosaics above. The wooden benches were dark and despite it being a glorious day outside, the stained glass did not let in much sunshine.
Still compared to our next destination, the sanctuary of this historically significant church was positively overexposed. It is still a working Catholic church, with mass held every Sunday, but it was the history that we there for. For one, the bones (aka relics for the faithful) of Clement, a fourth century Corinthian killed by the emperor Trajan. The basilica dates from 1100 AD and has the one of the largest collections of medieval wall paintings in Rome. It certainly does not lack for ornamentation, from the floor inlaid with semi-precious stones, to the ceiling that is a masterwork in gilding.
Underneath this space, however, is another story entirely. Archaeological digs have revealed the remains of more than two thousand years of usage, which have been stabilised and fitted for tourists.
From the rather bland office of the basilica, you descend a wide set of stone steps, and are immediately hit by the moisture in the air. The space is dark, lit only by rather eerie blue lamps. This level represents an early Catholic church, which in its early years was a clandestine operation. On this level, it is difficult to get a sense of the space as it once must have been – to be perfectly honest, it just felt like a series of rather large stone rooms, with a few faded paintings of saintly myths on the wall.
At the end of that structure, you descend to the next level, where the darkness seems doubled, maybe because the spaces are much smaller, the ceiling lower. This is was a first century Roman senator’s home, which also contained a pagan shrine to Mithras, a deity associated with bulls. The sound of running water that could be heard in the level above finds its source here below, to the point that it sounds like a river is rushing beneath your feet. The air down here is very moist, clammy and the rooms connect to each other through narrow passage ways.
It is at this point in my journey that I began to feel the stone walls closing in ever so slightly. I have a wonderfully overactive imagination, that kicked into overdrive when I found myself separated from the group, stumbling along a tunnel like passage way. It felt like a scene from a B-grade movie — the foolish maiden lured into the labyrinth, pursued by the minotaur. All I needed was to bump into an albino monk and we’d be filming The Da Vinci Code.
You can imagine my relief then when I bumped into some of our party, who ever so kindly indulged my strangled ‘Get me out of this place!’ and walked with me to the exit.
The metaphor here, of course, is a rather obvious one — weight of history etc, but I truly was struck by a sense of all that had come before, everything that had happened here, how incredibly OLD this city was. It is a city where you are constantly stepping on ghosts as it were, and in religious buildings it seems this happens tenfold. It’s something I’ve noticed particularly in Catholic churches – they seem to have absorbed a great deal of the earlier city’s paganism, allowing statues of Roman deities to sit in their church, often modified to represent a saint. The Egyptian obelisk that stands in front of St. Peter’s Basilica is the best example of this attitude of compromise.
Whether it’s practical recycling or doctrinally questionable I wouldn’t want to say – but in the cases of buildings, it makes for some pretty scary basements.
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