Hills and Catacombs

On to the third week of my Roman "holiday," and the museum trips are getting more and more numerous. The whole class took a tour of the Capitoline Museum, next to the Piazza Venezia and one of the "seven" hills of Rome. Housing mostly sculpture, the Capitoline contains such pieces as the iconic She-Wolf, the Dying Gaul, and the Marble Faun (which Nathaniel Hawthorne took as inspiration for his book of the same name). It was one of those museums where there's simply too much stuff; there were around four rooms filled with over a hundred busts of Roman dignitaries. Still, it was an interesting antithesis to the truly postmodern Ara Pacis museum.

Yesterday the ten members of the St. Peter's history class took a drive up the old Appian Way to delve into the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, an important early Christian site for its use as a temporary tomb for the bodies of the Apostles Paul and Peter. We tunneled deep into the necropolis, and enjoyed a truly original experience. I hate to use the Indiana Jones reference again, but it really felt like a giant boulder was going to roll towards us at any moment. There were remnants of ancient frescoes, fully preserved sarcophagi dating from the 1st century, and a set of immaculate family mausoleums with the pottery shards still housed inside. Although I had to stoop the entire way (I guess everybody was 5'6 at the time), it was refreshing to view a Roman treasure that had not been trampled by the tourist horde.