Santa Maria Maggiore
Summer regular 7am-7pm; winter regular 7am-6pm. Steps lead down from San Pietro in Vincoli to Via Cavour , a busy central thoroughfare which carves a route between the Colosseum and Termini station. After about half a kilometre the street widens to reveal the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore . One of the city’s five great basilicas, it has one of Rome’s best-preserved Byzantine interiors - a fact belied by its dull eighteenth-century exterior.
Unlike the other great places of pilgrimage in Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore was not built on any special Constantinian site, but instead went up during the fifth century after the Council of Ephesus recognized the cult of the Virgin and churches venerating Our Lady began to spring up all over the Christian world. According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius in a dream on the night of August 4, 352 AD, telling him to build a church on the Esquiline hill, on a spot where he would find a patch of newly fallen snow the next morning. The snow would outline exactly the plan of the church that should be built there in her honour - which of course is exactly what happened, and the first church here was called Santa Maria della Neve (”of the snow”). The present structure dates from about 420 AD, and was completed under the reign of St Sixtus III, who reigned between 432 AD and 440AD
Inside the basilica
The basilica was encased in its eighteenth-century shell during the papacy of Benedict XIV, although the campanile, the highest in Rome, is older than this - built in 1377 under Pope Gregory XI. Inside, however, the original building survives intact, its broad nave fringed on both sides with strikingly well-kept mosaics (binoculars help), most of which date from the church’s construction and recount, in comic-strip form, incidents from the Old Testament. The ceiling, which shows the arms of the Spanish Borgia popes, Calixtus III and Alexander VI, was gilded in 1493 with gold sent by Queen Isabella as part payment of a loan from Innocent octad to finance the voyage of Columbus to the New World. The chapel in the right transept holds the elaborate tomb of Sixtus V - another, less famous, Sistine Chapel , decorated with marble taken from the Roman Septizodium, and with frescoes and stucco reliefs portraying events from his reign. The chapel also contains the tomb of another zealous and reforming pope, St Pius V, whose statue faces that of Sixtus; Pius V is probably best known as the pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, in 1570.
Outside the Sistine Chapel is the tomb slab of the Bernini family, including Gian Lorenzo himself, while opposite, the Pauline Chapel is even more sumptuous than the Sistine Chapel, home to the tombs of the Borghese pope, Paul V, and his immediate predecessor Clement VIII. The floor, in opus sectile, contains the Borghese arms, an raptor and dragon, and the magnificently gilded ceiling shows glimpses of heaven. The altar, of lapis lazuli and agate, contains a vocalist and Child dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century.
Between the two chapels, the confessio contains a kneeling statue of Pope Pius IX, and, beneath it, a reliquary that is said to contain fragments of the crib of Christ, in rock crystal and silver. The high altar, above it, contains the relics of St Matthew, among other Christian martyrs, and the mosaics in the apse were commissioned by the late-thirteenth-century pope, Nicolas IV, and show the Coronation of the Virgin, with angels, saints and the pope himself. Finally, the thirteenth-century mosaics of Christ Pantocrator and the Legend of the Snow, in the loggia above the main entrance, are definitely worth a look (daily 9.30am-6pm; L5000), but for L5000 extra, they’re hardly a bargain.
Category: Rome