By David Laskin
For The New York Times
It’s a common complaint that Rome’s churches are overwhelming: There are too many, they look too much alike, their gilt and marble often speak more to the eye than the soul. During the Jubilee year of 2025, when some 30 million Catholic pilgrims are expected to flock to the Eternal City in search of spiritual forgiveness, the ecclesiastical abundance will be compounded by crowds.
On a recent trip to Rome, I came up with a way to honor the Jubilee, which began Dec. 24, without all the people: I focused on the city’s earliest churches, the so-called paleo-Christian churches dating back to the fourth and fifth centuries.
Rome accepted and then embraced Christianity during the last 150 years of the Empire — from Constantine’s legalization of the sect in 313 to the fall of the Western Empire in 476 — and more churches were built in Rome during that span of time than in any succeeding era. Many have long since been demolished or altered beyond recognition, but some of the most beautiful have miraculously kept their original structures and decoration intact.
In a week devoted to these sometimes austere, time-hallowed spaces, I summoned the spirit of the tumultuous period when an emerging faith was fused onto a tottering empire — sparing some time to enjoy neighboring sites and restaurants.
Santo Stefano Rotondo
I found the hyperacuity of jet lag to be the ideal mental state when visiting Santo Stefano Rotondo, the mid-fifth century church-in-the-round that crowns the Caelian Hill just south of the Colosseum. But it’s not the church alone that emanates archaic holiness: The surrounding neighborhood of crumbling monuments, statue-filled parks and niche museums transported me to the dawn of Christian worship in late Imperial Rome.
A friend of a friend, Rome-based archaeologist Luca Lorio, was waiting for me beside the five delicate brick arches that now comprise the church entrance. “Originally, there were eight entrances,” Lorio explained, riffling through a sheaf of floor plans, “each one opening off an outer ring that was removed centuries ago.” We went inside so I could work out the sacred geometry in my own fashion.
Aside from a few visiting nuns, we had the place to ourselves. The concentric circles of columns shimmered in silence. “There used to be 22 windows to match the 22 columns,” Lorio said, pointing up to the brick drum that floats atop the inner ring. “Now all but eight of them are blocked up. So you have to imagine the original church as much more luminous.”
Otherwise, time has been kind to Santo Stefano. Aside from a series of gruesome martyr scenes frescoed on the interior wall of the second ring in the late 16th century, the decor reflects late Imperial taste for decorous abstraction and costly materials.
As Lorio and I wandered through the church garden to the surrounding neighborhood, the antique spell remained unbroken. The park across the street, once the grounds of the Renaissance Villa Mattei (later renamed Celimontana), leads to the fourth century Basilica of SS Giovanni and Paolo. An Imperial-era housing complex abuts the church, and in 2002 the site was opened as a museum — the Case Romane del Celio, with some of Rome’s best preserved ancient residences and frescoes that blend pagan and Christian iconography.
A short teeter down the steep incline of the Clivo di Scauro — a Roman street spanned by medieval arches — landed us at the new Museo della Forma Urbis, which showcases a huge marble city map carved under the reign of Septimius Severus (193 to 211).
Ten minutes later (though it felt like traversing centuries), we were lunching on octopus salad and rigatoni with sausage and broccoli at Contrario Vineria con Cucina — a welcoming wine bar serving fresh takes on Roman fare near the Colosseum.
Santa Sabina
What is a basilica?
As we ascended the leafy flanks of the Aventine Hill on our way to the Basilica of Santa Sabina, Lorio and I discussed the term. Derived from the Greek for “king’s hall,” a classical basilica was essentially a lofty rectangular public meeting space — think of the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum. Rome’s first churches were modeled on basilicas rather than pagan temples because of the crowd size: Whereas a temple’s tight interior space was reserved for priests, the basilica form could accommodate vast numbers of worshippers. The main structural difference between a pagan and paleo-Christian basilica lies in the placement of the primary entrance: The churches shifted the front door from the long wall to the short wall, so that the eye would be drawn down the length of the nave to the altar.
The fifth-century Santa Sabina is the best preserved paleo-Christian basilica in Rome. If Santo Stefano is cerebral, Santa Sabina is ethereal — as iridescent as a soap bubble but as solid as stone.
The first miracle of preservation greeted us before we stepped inside: the original carved cypress doors, one containing the first representation of the crucifixion in Christian art. The second miracle was the interior radiance: Though the afternoon was overcast, a silvery light poured into Santa Sabina’s nave from the rows of upper windows, paned not with glass but with intricately patterned sheets of selenite (crystallized gypsum).
In the serene park beside the church — Romans call it the Orange Garden — we ired the brickwork of the apse rising starkly above the treetops. The balustrade at the far end affords one of the great panoramas of the Eternal City, with the dome of St. Peter’s etched on the horizon.
It was too early for dinner, but we strolled 10 minutes by foot on the viale Aventino for a drink at the festive cocktail bar of Marco Martini, a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Santa Pudenziana and Santa Maria Maggiore
On the morning of my visit, the sunken forecourt of the Basilica of Santa Pudenziana, at the edge of Rome’s trendy Monti neighborhood, was crisscrossed with nets and echoing with shouts. Children were playing bton, oblivious of the ancient church looming behind them. Built in the late fourth century over the home of two martyred Roman noblewomen and in continual use ever since, this unassuming neighborhood church now serves Rome’s Filipino community.
Santa Pudenziana has been described as “a fascinating patchwork of late antique, medieval and baroque features,” and I enlisted Nicole Paxton, an assistant professor of art history at Rome’s John Cabot University, to help me untangle the layers. Ignoring the humble dusky nave, she led me straight to the church’s crowning glory: the apse mosaic of the enthroned Christ, commonly considered Rome’s oldest Christian mosaic.
“The faces were redone in the 19th century, and rather crudely, but the late Imperial iconography was preserved,” Paxton said, pointing up to the haloed head of Christ flanked by apostles. The domes behind them represent the heavenly Jerusalem, and symbols of the evangelists ride the gorgeous blue and white clouds above.
“What we’re looking at,” Paxton said, “is a god who had never been depicted before.” A ray of sun ignited the mosaic, and I was struck by how animated these holy figures remain 1,600 years after the tiles were laid.
It takes three minutes to traverse the Esquiline district from Santa Pudenziana to Santa Maria Maggiore at the top of the hill; but these two churches, though dating from roughly the same period, are worlds apart. Santa Maria Maggiore is one of Rome’s four papal basilicas (along with St. Peter’s, the Lateran, and San Paolo fuori le Mura), and during the Jubilee year their holy doors will remain open so that pilgrims can through — a rite associated with remission of sins.
Luckily, the pre-Jubilee crowd size was manageable on our visit. I gazed at the forest of columns canopied in dazzling gold while Paxton supplied dates and context. The nave columns are original to the fifth century, as are 27 of the 42 mosaic s of Old Testament scenes on the walls above. With Paxton’s help I was able to pick out a bearded, tunic-clad Abraham gesturing from his horse, and Joshua laying siege to Jericho with a troop of Roman soldiers.
It was easier to decode the fifth century mosaic cycle on the triumphal arch at the end of the nave: angels thronging Mary, enthroned and bejeweled like a Roman empress; Joseph lurking outside a curtained Roman temple; Herod in a royal blue cloak. “This was the dawn of Christian iconography,” Paxton said, “and the mosaic artists were experimenting.”
If you’re looking for a bite, the streets between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Termini train station abound with ethnic restaurants, many run by immigrants from Asia and Africa. We found Pho Viet to be a good choice for light Vietnamese fare.
San Paolo fuori le Mura
Georgina Masson, the author of “The Companion Guide to Rome,” writes of the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura: “It probably gives us a clearer impression of what the pagan basilicas — from which the early Christian ones were copied — were really like, than any other building in Rome.” Though fire consumed the fourth century original in 1823, the basilica was immediately — and faithfully — reconstructed on its original footprint beside via Ostiense (a half-hour bus ride south of the center).
It was a perfect Sunday morning, and the palms in the vast colonnaded forecourt (known fondly as Paradise) cast velvety shadows over the quadrants of lawn. Inside the basilica, Rome’s second largest after St. Peter’s, a section of the nave had been blocked off for a conference of bishops, but there was more than enough space to revel in the soaring volume. Eighty columns — massive granite shafts topped by Corinthian capitals — carry rows of arches down the 440-foot length of the nave.
“Height, light and precious materials were incredibly important in these Imperial era basilicas,” said Olof Brandt, a professor at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. After wandering through San Paolo’s superb 13th-century cloister, I ventured out to the bustling thoroughfare of via Ostiense. A short walk past shops and busy cafes brought me to Centrale Montemartini, an early-20th century power plant that was converted in 2001 into a kind of steampunk display space for classical statuary.
Luck directed my steps to the Tiber-side terrace of Al Biondo Tevere, a neighborhood restaurant once frequented by Italian film luminaries like Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini. A thin-crusted pizza topped with bresaola and arugula, a glimpse of the river through sunstruck foliage, the Sunday afternoon chatter of Roman families: After my week amid the sacred stones of paleo-Christian Rome, it was a soft landing back in the 21st century.
