Basilica di Santa Sabina

Church · Aventino (Rione Ripa)Rome,Italy

A Rome church of about 432, a wide white hall lit through crystal, its cypress doors carrying the earliest known image of the Crucifixion.

Santa Sabina was finished around 432, and it is the one church in Rome where you can see what a church looked like then. A priest from the Dalmatian coast built it on the Aventine hill. Twentieth-century restorers stripped away the altars, plasterwork and gilding that later centuries had added, so the interior is a wide white hall again. Twenty-four matching ancient columns carry round arches down both sides. The windows hold thin sheets of selenite rather than glass, and this crystal lets a soft, slightly milky light into the nave that makes the whole room glow evenly. The doors are older than almost anything inside. Carved in cypress wood around 430 and still hanging in the entrance porch, they hold eighteen surviving panels of biblical scenes. In the top left corner, three men stand with their arms out against a wall: Christ and the two thieves. It is generally accepted as the earliest surviving image of the Crucifixion, made at a time when Christians still avoided showing the cross at all. The porch is dim, the panel is small, and most visitors walk past it into the nave without looking up.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Stop and look back at the doors once you are inside — their carved faces point into the nave rather than out at the porch, which is why almost everyone walks past them twice without seeing the panels.
Come on a bright morning — the selenite panes need strong sun behind them to work, and in dull weather the nave loses most of the light the building was designed around.
The midday closure here is long and firm — arriving at lunchtime means a locked door, and the afternoon reopening is later than at most churches in the centre.
Wait at the back if the friars are singing — this is the Dominicans' own church, the nave closes to visitors during services, and the singing is worth stopping for anyway.

Things to do

1
Find the Crucifixion in the porch
Stand back from the doors so you can see the whole grid of carved panels, then look at the panel in the top left corner. It shows three figures with their arms out in front of a wall of small stones. There is no cross under them, because at that date nobody had yet worked out how to show one. Look also at how deeply the wood is cut.
2
Stand at the back of the nave with the light behind you
Walk to the west end and turn round. Twenty-four columns line the nave in two rows, the arches above them all begin at the same height, and the selenite windows high up give a flat, even light with no colour in it. The room has almost no decoration, so what you notice is its proportions.
3
Look into the cloister garden
Beside the church, a small door opens onto the Dominican cloister and its orange tree, which the friars say grew from one that Dominic planted here in the thirteenth century. The cloister belongs to a working friary, so it is not open every day: ask at the door instead of walking in, and be ready to be told no.