| It is the year A.D. 64. An ocean of flame and smoke is engulfing the narrow streets and crowded apartment buildings between Rome's Coelian and Appian Hills. From his Domus Transitoria Palace on the Coelian Mount, the Emperor Nero sings a tale of the Sack of Troy and watches the panic-stricken populace flee their flaming dwellings below. The first stratum of San Clemente is reduced to smoldering rubble.
Through the grilled opening we glimpse a section of orange brick wall and a piece of brick pavement. These were discovered during construction (1912-14) of a tunnel to drain a lake located under the basilica and have been identified as the charred remains of houses that existed before and were destroyed by the Neronian fire of 64. The ruins of these gutted dwellings were filled in and used as the foundations for a later residential area.
We are in the last decades of the first century A.D., the dawn of Christianity and the era of persecution. Here, only a few steps from the Colosseum in the very heart of imperial Rome, is the city mansion of Titus Flavius Clemens, Roman Consul and cousin of the Emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D. ) Clemens' wife Flavia Domitilla is a recent convert and the family has transferred its home into a clandestine house of prayer, a secret meeting Place for the Christian Community. This small community boasts a particularly holy personage, Clement, Clemens' freed Jewish slave, who has worked and preached with Sts. Peter and Paul. Later Clemens himself will be martyred and Flavia will carry on the cult as best she can.
The age of persecutions is over. Constantine' s victory and the Edict of Milan (313) have facilitated the confident expansion of the Christian Church in Rome. In the Pontificate of Pope Siricius (384-399) the clergy attached to the small titular church of the Clement family has also acquired the adjoining apartment complexes. Fourth-century architects are filling in the rooms and courtyards, constructing a central nave over the large area of early Christian worship, and triumphantly extending an apse over the former Mithraic temple (misterious persian religion arrived till here!) .The new church, mentioned by St. Jerome as early as 392, is dedicated to Pope St. Clement, a contemporary of the Roman Consul Clement. As the centuries pass, San Clemente becomes one of Rome's best loved and most adorned churches. In the sixth century Justinian's wife, the Byzantine Empress Theodora (d. 548) has her portrait—very
similar to another in Ravenna's San Vitale—painted in a niche in the north aisle. (Later she will be provided with a throne and infant and thus converted into a ninth-century Madonna and Child.) In the following centuries artists compete to embellish the basilica with colorful frescoes.
Cheers,
Dariush |
