Under Trastevere: A Lost Basilica and a Martyr's House

Two staircases, two different kinds of building underneath. Under San Crisogono there is a church. The medieval basilica at street level was built on top of a 4th-century one, and the earlier building is still down there with its walls, its frescoes and its crypt, in the particular silence of a room that has had another room built over it. San Crisogono is one of the tituli, the house churches that were the earliest Christian foundations in the city, which is why the lower building goes back as far as it does. Under Santa Cecilia there is a house. The mosaic floor of a 3rd-century Roman dwelling is still in place, and by tradition it belonged to Cecilia herself. Her death was botched and drawn out, and the story is told in front of the room where it is supposed to have happened. That difference, a public building under one church and a private one under the other, is what makes doing both in a single walk worth the time. Back at floor level in Santa Cecilia there is the marble figure by Stefano Maderno, carved in 1600 after the tomb had been opened the year before. He shows her on her side with the face turned away and the cut visible in the neck, and he maintained he was recording the position the body was found in. Whatever you make of the claim, that sculpture is the reason the church is on this route. The Cavallini Room and its Last Judgement are included on morning departures only. That is not the operator being awkward. Pietro Cavallini's fresco of around 1290 is in the nuns' choir above the nave, the only way to it runs through the enclosed Benedictine convent next door, and the community opens it for a short window in the morning and shuts it for the rest of the day. Book an afternoon slot and you will not see it, whatever else you see. The walk starts by the Tiber and ends in front of the gold mosaics of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in the square where the neighbourhood keeps its wine shops and trattorie, which is where you are left to carry on by yourself. The group forms in Piazza Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, at the Trastevere foot of Ponte Garibaldi, under the monument to the poet who wrote more than two thousand sonnets in Roman dialect and asked on his deathbed for them to be burned. It is a hard landmark to miss. Both undergrounds charge admission at their own doors and both of those fees sit inside this price, which is where a good part of the cost goes once the guide is accounted for. Headphones are handed out and they earn their keep below ground, where the vaults throw voices around and the passages are too tight for a group to stand in a ring. Two hours covers both descents, the churches at ground level and the streets in between, so each underground gets something like half an hour. Both are reached by stairs and neither is step-free, which rules this out for anyone who cannot manage a flight down and back up. The compensation is that in August the temperature under those churches is nothing like the temperature in the square above them.