Catacombs of Rome

The oldest cores of the Roman catacombs date to the end of the second century, among them the Catacomb of San Callisto and the sand-pit area of the Catacomb of Priscilla, which took over an existing quarry. Before that, Christians had been buried together with pagans, without particular distinction of belief. Roman law forbade burial inside the city, so these cemeteries all lie outside the walls, cut into tufa, a volcanic rock soft to dig and hardening afterwards. Underground burial was not new, but the catacombs extended it from a family to a whole community bound by shared faith.

Christianity, and in part Judaism, held to the resurrection of the body, which could not be squared with cremation, and open-air cemeteries could not hold the unburnt bodies of a growing mass of believers. Poverty counted too: during the economic crisis of the third-century military anarchy many Christian and Jewish families could not pay for a grave, and the ethics of both communities required them to relieve their indigent by providing low-cost graves. Digging out a catacomb was the cheap option: a monumental tomb on a road like the Via Appia cost a fortune.

By the third century there were twenty-five cemeteries in the suburbs of Rome, on land bought by the community or given to it by wealthy members. Some belonged to the Church directly: Hippolytus records in the Philosophumena that Pope Zephyrinus appointed the deacon Callixtus, not yet pope himself, custodian and administrator of the cemetery on the Appian Way. On his own accession Callixtus enlarged it, and it soon became the official cemetery of the Roman Church; its arcades held more than fifty martyrs and sixteen popes. In the first half of the third century Rome was divided into seven ecclesiastical regions, each assigned its own places of worship and its own catacombs.

In 313 Christianity was recognised as a lawful religion, mass conversions followed, and the catacombs went on expanding, in some cases sinking further to add levels connected by stairs. Many Roman Christians went down into them to find relics of the martyrs and rifled the remains, and vandalism became rampant; in 380 Christianity became the religion of the state. The old picture of the catacombs as secret refuges in time of persecution has been discarded by researchers; their locations were widely known, and their larger chambers were used for memorial meals with the dead. About 80 per cent of the excavations used for Christian burial date to after the time of the persecutions.

In the second half of the fourth century burial in the catacombs slowed sharply, with one exception: graves placed beside or behind the tombs of martyrs, ad sanctos, sought for the intercession of the saint at the judgement after death. The demand was driven by Pope Damasus I, who held office from 366 to 384 and was the first great promoter of the cult of the martyrs; he had the catacombs restored, consolidated and enlarged so that the faithful could visit them, and set marble slabs at the venerated graves carrying verses of his own composition, cut by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. An inscription of 382 calls such a grave a privilege that many desire and few obtain. Through the fifth century new burials became rare, but pilgrims continued to come.

In the sixth century the Gothic wars and the successive sieges of Rome emptied the city and left the early Christian sites of the suburbs to plunder and abandonment; the Ostrogoths, Vandals and Lombards who sacked Rome violated the catacombs as well, apparently looking for valuables. They were used by then only for the memorial services of the martyrs, though paintings were still added as late as the seventh century, among them a Saint Stephen in the Catacomb of Commodilla. Between the eighth and ninth centuries the sanctuaries outside the walls were abandoned and the relics carried into the churches of the city, after which vegetation and landslips closed the entrances. By the later Middle Ages all trace of where the catacombs lay had been lost, only San Sebastiano, San Lorenzo and San Pancrazio being still remembered. By the tenth century they were practically abandoned and the holy relics had been moved to basilicas above ground. J. Osbourne disputes that characterisation, putting the fall into disrepair later, after the papacy left Rome for Avignon, and blaming the want of religious practice in the city.

The catacombs were rediscovered by accident in 1578. Antonio Bosio, who lived from 1575 to 1629, spent decades exploring and recording them for his Roma Sotterranea, published after his death, and Giovanni Battista de Rossi, 1822 to 1894, produced the first extensive professional studies of them. The Jewish catacombs, of which six are known, were discovered in 1918 and worked on for twelve years; they date from between the second and third centuries and may have stayed in use into the fifth. Italian authorities found further catacombs near Rome in 1956 and 1959, and more than fifty are now known beneath the city.

Under the Lateran Pacts of 1929 between the Italian state and the Holy See, the catacombs certainly or probably belonging to the Christian community were placed in the custody of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which directs excavation and restoration, while their study is directed by the Pontifical Academy of Archaeology. Day-to-day administration is entrusted to local clergy or religious orders: the Salesian Fathers hold San Callisto, the Benedictine nuns of Priscilla the catacomb of that name, and the Divine Word Missionaries took on Domitilla at the request of the Vatican at the beginning of 2009. Five are open to the public, San Sebastiano, San Callisto, Priscilla, Domitilla and Sant'Agnese; the others are closed for the instability of their structures and the radon in them.