predictable that this deviation from routine seemed to catch them mightily by surprise.
‘The catacombs,’ she said. ‘St Callixtus. But please don’t tell anyone.’
It seemed as though a lifetime had passed since Elisabetta had last entered these grounds. The entrance to St Callixtus was off the Appian Way which, on a late Sunday afternoon, was nearly deserted. She’d forgotten how quickly the land turned rural when one passed through the ancient southern walls of the city.
Off the main road, the avenue leading to the catacombs was lined by stands of tall cypresses, their tops glowing orange in the dwindling sunlight. Beyond was a large tract of wooded and agricultural land owned by the Church and containing an old Trappist monastery, a dormitory for the catacomb guides and the Quo Vadis? church. To the west lay the Catacombs of Domitilla. To the east, the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. The whole region was sacred.
The driver – who had remained mute during their journey – sprung out and opened the car door before Elisabetta had a chance to work the handle herself. Professor De Stefano was waiting at the public entrance, a low structure which resembled a simple Mediterranean villa.
Inside, De Stefano led her past the policeman who stood guard at the visitors’ iron gate. From there they headed down a stone stairway into the bowels of the earth.
‘It’s a walk,’ he said. ‘Halfway to Domitilla. There’s really no short cut.’
Elisabetta lifted her robes just enough to prevent herself from tripping. The subterranean air was dead and familiar. ‘I remember the way,’ she replied. She felt a disturbing blend of apprehension and excitement course through her as she remembered her previous times here and thought ahead to the imminent new revelations.
They moved briskly through the normal tourist areas. The galleries, cut by pickaxes and shovels from the soft volcanic tufo from the second through the fifth centuries AD, were somber remains of a broad sweep of history. The Romans had always buried or cremated their dead in necropolises outside the city walls for it was strictly forbidden to do so within the city limits. The wealthy built family tombs. The poor were crammed into mass graves.
Yet the early Christians stubbornly refused to mix their dead with pagan bones and most of them were too poor to afford proper tombs. A solution was found on the rural estates of sympathizers. Dig your necropolises, they were told. Burrow as extensively as you please, come and visit your dead freely, but leave our fields intact. Thus the catacombs were spawned at all compass points outside the city walls but especially to the south, off the Appian Way.
Over the centuries vast networks of subterranean galleries were tunneled to hold the remains of Popes and martyrs, commoners and the lofty. The Popes had elaborate frescoed vaults where pilgrims came to venerate them. The poor had small loculi, not much more than stone shelves cut into the rock to hold their wrapped bodies. Perhaps their names were inscribed in the stone, perhaps not. Loved ones left behind the holy symbols of their new religion, the fish, the anchor, the dove and the chi-rho cross. As time went on, the galleries were extended into multi-level mazes, miles of tunnels to accommodate hundreds of thousands of the dead faithful.
Though Christianity’s early history was troubled, fortune eventually favored the new religion when, in the fourth century AD, the Emperor Constantine himself converted to it, banned the persecution of Christians and returned confiscated Church properties. Gradually, the remains of the Popes and important martyrs were removed from catacombs and buried in consecrated ground within the grounds of churches. The sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 put an end to the use of the catacombs for fresh burials, though for centuries pilgrims continued to visit them and Popes did their best to preserve and even embellish the important vaults.
Yet their preservation would last only so long and by the ninth century relics were transferred with increased frequency to churches within the city walls. The catacombs were doomed to a form of extinction. Their entrances became overgrown by vegetation and they were lost in time, completely forgotten until the sixteenth century when Antonio Bosio, the Christopher Columbus of subterranean Rome, rediscovered one, then another, then thirty of them, and systematically began their study.
But tomb robbers followed and over the next two centuries most marble and precious artifacts disappeared until, in 1852, the Church put all Christian catacombs under the protection of the newly created Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.
Elisabetta had always felt a sense of peace inside these rough-cut narrow passageways, the color of deep sunset. How the walls and low ceilings must have come alive with a sense of motion as pilgrims passed through, clutching their flickering oil lamps! How excited they must have felt, plunging through the darkness, glimpsing the corpses in their
Now the loculi were empty. There were no longer any bones, lamps or offerings, just bare rectangular recesses cut into the rock. Elisabetta lightly touched a remembered fragment of plaster on one of the walls. It had the fragile outline of a dove holding an olive branch. It made her sigh.
De Stefano walked quickly and confidently for a man of his age. From time to time he turned to make sure that Elisabetta was keeping up. For the first ten minutes of their journey the tunnels were those open to the public. They passed through the crypts of Cecilia and the Popes, skirted the tombs of St Gaius and Eusebius until they came to an unlatched iron gate, its key in the lock. The Liberian Area was off the tourist path. Completed in the fourth century, it was the last sector to have been dug out, a twisting three-level network of passages.
The cave-in was at the outermost reaches of the Liberian Area. When De Stefano paused at a poorly lit intersection of two galleries and momentarily seemed at a loss, Elisabetta gently advised him to take a left.
‘Your memory is excellent,’ he said appreciatively.
A faint sound of metal against rubble grew louder as they approached their destination. The plastered wall which had sparked Elisabetta’s interest years ago was gone, turned into dust by the collapse. Now there was a gaping opening, irregular like the mouth of a cave.
‘Here we are,’ De Stefano said. ‘The heavy work’s been done. There’s good timber erected. If I didn’t think it was safe I wouldn’t have brought you.’
‘God will protect,’ Elisabetta said, peering into the harshly lit space.
Inside the chamber there were three men who were shoveling a mixture of tuff, dirt and bricks. Some kind of manual hoist system was in place to lift their buckets out of the cave-in. The men stopped working and stared at Elisabetta through the entrance.
‘These are my most trusted assistants,’ De Stefano said. ‘Gentlemen, this is Sister Elisabetta.’ The men were young. Despite the cool subterranean temperature they were soaked through with sweat. ‘Gian Paolo Trapani is directly responsible for all the catacombs of the Via Antica and he’s acting as foreman for the operation.’
The pleasant-looking young man who came forward had longish hair, reddened by tufo dust. He didn’t seem to know if he should extend a grimy hand so he made do with, ‘Hello, Sister. I heard you studied here once. It’s a pity that it took a quake to make an excavation. It’s such a mess now.’
Elisabetta followed De Stefano through the opening. The chamber was irregularly shaped, generally rectangular. But the margins were ill-defined because of the piles of rubble. Wooden supports, thick as railway ties, had been laid in to support the sides and the earth overhead. The space was at least fifteen meters by ten, she thought, but the cave-in made it hard to be precise. There was a shaft of light coming in from a good ten meters above. A head appeared and another fellow yelled down. ‘Why are you stopping?’ He was manning the block and pulleys of the bucket rig.
‘Go take a break!’ Trapani shouted and the head disappeared.
Elisabetta’s first impression was that their work was favoring speed over science. There were no excavation grids, no signs of measurement and documentation, no camera tripods or drawing tables. The ground seemed to have been cleared in one frantic effort rather than deliberately, meter by meter. Blue tarps covered much of the floor. Only one of the walls was reasonably vertical. It was covered by a suspended tarp.
‘Sorry it’s so untidy,’ Trapani said, looking at her shoes and hemline, which were covered in tuff dust. ‘We’ve been moving faster than we’d like.’
‘So I see,’ Elisabetta said.
She was surprised at how seamlessly she made the shift into the observational mode of an archeologist. For twelve years she’d focused on an interior space, the realm of emotion and belief, faith and prayer. But at this moment, her mind won out over her heart. She stepped gingerly through the chamber, avoiding the ubiquitous tarps, taking in details and sorting them.
‘The bricks,’ Elisabetta said, stooping to pick one up. ‘Typical first-century Roman – long and narrow. And
