Basilica di San Clemente

Church · Rione Monti (Via Labicana / Via di San Giovanni in Laterano)Rome,Italy

Three Roman churches stacked one on another with a stair running down through all of them to a first-century lane and a Mithras hall.

San Clemente is three buildings stacked on one another, and a staircase runs down through all of them. The church at street level went up around 1100, and its apse carries a gold mosaic in which the cross grows into a vine that spreads across the whole half-dome. Beneath it stands the church it replaced, a fourth-century basilica whose plastered walls still hold painted scenes. One flight lower is a first-century lane, with a warehouse on one side and a private house on the other, and inside that house a long hall where men ate together in honour of the god Mithras. Rome's ground level kept rising, so the old church was packed with rubble and a new one raised on top of it. It stayed shut away until 1857, when the Irish Dominican prior Joseph Mullooly began digging because he kept hearing water under his room. He was right. A spring floods the lowest level, and a drainage tunnel cut toward the Colosseum in 1912 still carries it off, loud enough to hear in the dark. The upper church is a working Dominican parish, and the only way down is a narrow stone stair.

Worth knowing

Good to know

A long midday closure catches most people out — the church shuts for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, and Sunday mornings are given to Mass rather than to visitors.
The excavations run on timed entry and fill up early — the only way down is a stone stair, so anyone using a wheelchair can see the upper church only.
Give your eyes a minute at the bottom of the stairs — the lowest level is lit very dimly, and the carving on the Mithraic altar only becomes visible once your eyes have adjusted.
Look at the marble choir enclosure standing in the middle of the upper nave — its carved panels were lifted out of the older church below and set up again here.
Photography is not allowed on the two lower levels — the Dominican staff enforce it, and shoulders and knees stay covered upstairs as in any working church in the city.

Things to do

1
Walk down through three floors of the city
The stair to the excavations leaves from the sacristy on the right. Each landing puts you in an older Rome: first the fourth-century church with its faded painted walls, then a paved lane between a warehouse and a house. Count the flights on the way back up, because that height is how much the city's ground level has risen since Roman times.
2
Stand in the Mithras hall between its benches
The lowest room is long and low, with a stone bench running down each side and a carved altar at the far end. Stand in the middle and you are in the space as its members used it: dark, close and cut off from the street above, with water running somewhere behind the wall.
3
Find the donor couple painted on the middle church's wall
On the fourth-century level the walls carry scenes commissioned by a Roman couple who had themselves painted into them. Come close, because the paint is thin and the light is low. Step a little to one side as well, since the faces are easier to see at an angle than straight on.