Early morning Rome
What's your morning bus ride look like?
It blows my mind that people here can literally take a bus past the colosseum casually on their way to work and they don't even care because this is a normal thing.
I don't usually navigate the buses on my own (the Rome bus system intimidates me) but this place was an hour away on foot, so I was willing to try. It all went fine until on the last stop we got off a stop early and got kind of confused. Appian Way, the road we were on (and one of the most important roads to the early Roman republic!) is kind of narrow, with these stone walls on either side, and only about a foot of path to walk on while the cars whiz by you.
But we found the catacombs, at last, around 9 am. We got to the ticket office and found they had a sign saying "exact amount only only". I only had a twenty, and my roommate only had a fifty. They HATE making change here in Rome- cash really is king- especially if you ask them to break higher bills. I always break my fifties when I do my grocery shopping. They aren't pleased, but they kind of have to do it. And these tickets for the catacombs are eight euros, neither of us have that amount of money, and we both just spent about an hour getting here. I ended up giving the guy the twenty for both the tickets and making sad eyes at him until he grudgingly accepted it and gave us change. Success.
The area above the catacombs was so beautiful
We got a free tour with our tickets, and we had to gather next to these signs for our languages. There was French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English. Our group had six people in it- me, my roommate, a German english-speaking woman, two priests, and a monk. It sounds like the setup for a joke, I know, but that was our group. The groups went at different intervals, and the group behind us kept gaining on us, leading to our guide exclaiming at random intervals "The germans are coming!"
We weren't allowed to take pictures down there, so you'll have to rely on my narration.
The catacombs were really awesome. There are four levels of them, but the second level is the oldest (they went back and built the top level). There are over half a million bodies in there, including several saints and sixteen popes. The really cool thing about these catacombs is that unlike the Paris catacombs, these are super old. Like, so old that a lot of the writing inside is in Greek. The earliest stuff there is from the second century. That's old. And it's huge. Our tour guide kept saying that it was 15 hectares. Now, maybe because I'm just an American, but I had no idea what a hectare was. It's equal to 10,000 square meters. Our tour guide said it was around the equivalent of thirty acres. Yeah.
They used to dig these holes in the walls, wrap bodies up in white cloth, sprinkle limestone and calcium powder on them (to decrease smell and speed up decay), slide the bodies in the walls, and seal the hole. They had to seal the hole, so that the diseases that killed the dead wouldn't spread.
A lot of the history here comes from the persecution of the Christians in the days of Roman emperors. If Christianity was tolerated or not depended largely on the emperor. Christians weren't allowed to bury their dead with Christian rituals on the surface, so they did it down here. When the persecution got worse, they started meeting underground in secret to hold worship. At one point Roman soldiers stormed the catacombs, found a pope and four deacons holding mass, dragged them up, and executed them.
The catacombs fell into disuse for a few reasons. One was that the barbarians stormed the catacombs in the ninth century. People used to sometimes get buried with their belongings, especially gold, a practice brought over when some early Egyptians converted to Christianity. The barbarians destroyed 90% of the graves in the catacombs and swept everything onto the ground, then took the gold. It hurt the early Christians so much to see all the bones on the ground, broken and mixed with other bones, that they stopped going down there. Another reason was that when Emperor Constantine took power in 306, he converted to Christianity and allowed Christians to bury their dead aboveground. (I know my timeline isn't perfect, but this is me retelling what I remember from the tour guide)
The catacomb remained abandoned until 1854. Let me repeat that. This catacomb, roughly ended in the ninth century, remained abandoned until 1854. This young Italian archeologist (with one of the most Italian names I've ever heard) Giovanni Battista de Rossi rediscovered them. He applied to the vatican to go in and search, and they allowed it. He's a huge hero around here now. He's got a church named after him. I believe a few years back they petitioned to have his remains moved to a church (instead of a normal cemetery) and they allowed it.
We emerged from our tour blinking in the sunlight, checked out the gift shop, and headed back. I got off at the wrong stop, because I don't do buses well, but it wasn't too far back to our apartment so we just walked.
That was really cool. I've been wanting to see the catacombs for awhile and I'm glad I got to. The catacombs originally held the body of Saint Cecilia, until her remains were moved to her church. Tomorrow I think I'm going to go find that church. They say there's an amazing sculpture there.
So, today was a good day. And then, unexpectedly, my roommate asked if I wanted to see an opera tonight! You know me, I love opera, and I was delighted for the chance. The tickets were only like thirteen dollars, so why not? We're going to see Carmen. So that's happening tonight!
This was just pretty.
