Rome and the Christians in the 4th century. The conquest of visibility in the urban landscape

CYCLE: The Second Millennium of Rome.
SPEAKER: Lucrezia Spera
DATE: Thursday 10 April, 6 pm

In the decades following the Edict of Tolerance in 313, Christianity became progressively more visible in urban spaces. Specifically characterised religious buildings with a notable volumetric impact made the presence of a community tangible in the landscape, a community that had already been substantial in previous centuries, but had remained barely perceptible and had little impact on urban transformations. Now, the impetus of the imperial protectorate and the evergrowth of the elites set in motion a process of the Church's evident rooting in the city, which would constitute its identity profile in the Middle Ages.

In the period from Constantine to Theodosius, if the great building sites - of the episcopal group, within the walls, and of the main martyrial shrines and funerary basilicas in the suburbs - impose themselves with relevant experimental architectural typologies, the first ‘parish’ churches (the tituli) are absorbed into the residential neighbourhoods to which, due to their function of caring for souls, they were destined; the configuration of the urban landscape, in these years, is still strongly anchored to the subsistence of the prestigious buildings of the political-monumental centre of the Urbe, which still played the role of ‘virtual’ capital of the Empire.

Lucrezia Spera is full professor of Late Antique Archaeology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and teaches Christian Topography of Rome at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. A full member of the Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology, a corresponding member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom, and a member of the Vatican Committee for Byzantine Studies, she has directed her research mainly to the study of Rome in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the processes of Christianisation of spaces. Among his various field investigations, he directed the excavation of the medieval settlement at the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, for which he also coordinated the construction work.

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