The best water in Rome

[jere7my]

Monday, June 29 - Rome

A few blocks east of the Colosseum is the Basilica of San Clemente, a beautiful 11th-century church, sunk nineteen steps below street level, with a nice cloister and a lavishly decorated interior: a half-dome apse done in gleaming gold mosaic, a Cosmatesque mosaic floor, Renaissance frescoes on the walls. It's one of the few places in Rome where photography is not permitted, I'm afraid, but it's from the same mold as Santa Maria in Trastevere. The anchor (or "mariner's cross") of Clement's supposed martyrdom is everywhere.

Then, off the northern aisle, stairs lead down. They take you past fragments of inscriptions to the second church, below the church, the 4th-century basilica San Clemente was built on top of (or at least the bottom half of it). The floor of the church above is the ceiling of the church below. The air is cool and damp, the lighting dim and blue. What were once the aisles of the church are now long, low corridors of stone that echo with whispers and the distant sound of water. There's a dry, shallow basin in the floor, perhaps an early baptismal font. An altar crouches in golden light. On the walls are some of the finest early medieval frescoes extant.¹ The lower church is quiet, and mysterious, and heavy with time.

Then, beyond the tomb of Saint Cyril (all covered in Cyrillic), stairs lead down. They take you to the first-century neighborhood the 4th-century church was built on top of. The floor of the church above is the ceiling of the buildings below. The corridors are confusing, the tufa walls are rough. Inside a row of apartments is a Mithraeum (a temple to the Persian sun-god Mithras), deliberately cavelike, with a vaulted stone roof above a carved altar surrounded by stone couches and a niche containing an icon of the god. Across a narrow alley is a house that belonged to Flavius Clemens — Pope Clement himself, or perhaps the owner of the slave who would become Pope Clement? As you push on through his claustrophobic house, paying careful attention to the superimposed floor plans in the Blue Book, you come at last to the third church, the church below the churches, the tiny room where first-century Christians used to live and invite their friends to secret services. A spring rushes along behind a break in the wall, burbling over rocks the way it's been doing for two thousand years, and you can reach in and fill your cupped hands with cold water. It's pure and fresh and faintly sweet — the best water in Rome.

The apartments themselves were built on pre-imperial Republican foundations — but the stairs leading down from there end at the unexcavated floor, so that's as deep as you can go. It's forty feet back up to street level, and you recapitulate two thousand years of the growth of Christianity as you climb.

The façade as seen from the cloister.


Entrance to the cloister, sunken below street level.


Mysterious alphabet! I thought at first it was angelic script; it's actually the Glagolitic alphabet, adapted by Ss. Cyril and Methodius for use in converting the Slavs in Moravia. Letter origins are obscure, but many may have been modified from miniscule Greek, Hebrew, and Christian symbols (triangle and circle). Some of the characters look strangely like fetuses, with or without umbilici. If you're a font nerd like myself, you can download a free TrueType version called Dilyan.

¹ My favorite tells the story of the pagan Sisinius, who followed his wife to a meeting of Christians, in the hopes of reporting Pope Clement to the Roman authorities. He was struck blind and deaf for his treachery. Clement, being saintly and all, healed him, but Sisinius still told his servants to arrest him. They were, naturally, struck blind as well, and grabbed and arrested the stone pillars instead, while Sisinius egged them on: the inscription reads, "Go on, you sons of whores! Pull, pull away, Gosmari and Albertel! You, Carvoncelle, get behind with a lever!" This is the earliest known inscription in Italian, rather than Latin.