At the beginning of a new religious landscape: monumental evidence of Christianity in Rome before Constantine

CYCLE: The Second Millennium of Rome
SPEAKER: Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai
DATE: Thursday, 20 February, 6 p.m.

The impact of Christianity on the urban landscape of Rome was rather modest before the Constantinian turn. The tomb of Peter and its earliest monumental arrangements, that of Paul, the memorial of the 3rd mile of the Appian Way, where the two apostles were worshipped together, the suburban burial areas (catacombs, open air cemeteries) and the first places of worship within the city, destined for liturgical gatherings, delineate a new religious landscape ‘against the light’, in the face of a community that was already numerically significant in Nero's time and had grown considerably between the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 3rd century, as revealed, among other things, by the size of the cemetery areas. The Church's charitable activities in the urban area, and probably the liturgical and pastoral ones, were hinged, already by the mid 3rd century, on a specific regional division (the seven ecclesiastical regions), parallel to the Augustan one.

Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai is Professor of Christian Archaeology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and teaches Archaeology of Ancient Christian Cemeteries at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. A member of the Accademia dei Lincei, he has conducted research mainly on early Christian monuments in Rome and Latium in relation to the transformations of cities and the countryside in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In the Roman suburbs, between the Appian and Ardeatina roads, he discovered and investigated the ‘circiform’ basilica of Pope Mark in 1993-2012.

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