Churches of Rome
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Photographic Book Italy |
Some 25 of the original parish churches, or tituli, the first legal churches in Rome, still function. Most had been private houses in which the Christians illegally congregated, and some of these houses, as at SS. Giovanni e Paolo, are still preserved underneath the present church buildings. Since the 4th century the tituli priests have been cardinals who, over the centuries, have rebuilt, enlarged, and embellished their churches. In the 4th century, basilicas were built to mark the burial places of martyrs. Most martyrs had been interred beyond the city walls in the catacombs, underground galleries with recesses used as tombs. When later sieges of Rome laid waste the Campagna, saintly relics were removed to the safety of city churches. During the Middle Ages, when the prevalence of malaria and of tomb robbers—there was a brisk commerce in religious relics—made ventures beyond the walls risky, some of the oratories and basilicas fell almost to ruin and the location of some catacombs was forgotten.
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Style of the Roman churches |
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Among the basilicas, seven are designated as great (maggiore): St. Peter’s, S. Paolo Fuori le Mura (St. Paul’s Outside the Walls), and S. Giovanni in Laterano, all built by Constantine; and those of S. Lorenzo Fuori le Mura (St. Lawrence Outside the Walls), Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem), S. Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains), and Sta. Maria Maggiore. Under the 1929 concordat with Vatican City, the Italian government grants them extraterritorial privileges. The basilicas established the model for Western ecclesiastical architecture for centuries to come. |
Church of Rome. E. Buchot picture |
Basilica, a Greek word meaning royal, was used by the pre-Christian Romans to designate a public hall, but no surviving example of a Roman basilica anywhere in the empire is the architectural predecessor of the Christian basilica The basilical church has a nave higher than the aisles, from which it is separated by a colonnade on each side. It has either a cloistered court (atrium) or anteroom (narthex) or both at the west end and a semicircular projection (apse) at the east. The basilicas in Rome that are closest to the early Christian structures are the churches of competing cults, as strikingly exemplified by the Neo-Pythagorean-sect basilica of the Porta Maggiore, unearthed by the railroad viaduct in 1926. |
Some early Christian churches were centrally rather than longitudinally organized, a plan dictated by the circular form of the imperial mausoleums into which they were built. A good example is Sta. Costanza (c. ad 320), which also has a superb series of 4th-century vault mosaics in pagan designs. Although churches of this type were few, they had a strong influence on the development of the centrally planned house of worship. Britannica enciclopedia |
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