Catacombs of Rome: Which to Visit

1. What a Roman Catacomb Is

A Roman catacomb is a cemetery dug downward and sideways through tufa, the soft volcanic rock that lies under the countryside around Rome. Narrow corridors were cut at head height and then widened, and the dead were laid in rectangular niches carved into the corridor walls, one above another, sealed with a tile or a marble slab and a name. The result is a network of galleries, sometimes stacked four or five levels deep, that belongs to the ordinary business of burying the dead rather than to any secret or defensive purpose.

Christians in Rome began digging these cemeteries in the second century and stopped burying in them in the early fifth. That gives the catacombs a span of roughly two hundred and fifty years of continuous Christian use, covering the period of the persecutions, the peace of the Church under Constantine, and the first decades of an imperial capital with a Christian majority. Everything in them, the painting, the epitaphs, the shape of the tombs and the plan of the galleries, comes from that window. There is no other body of evidence for early Christian life in Rome of comparable size.

The word itself is an accident of geography. One stretch of the Via Appia, near what is now the basilica of San Sebastiano, was known in antiquity as ad catacumbas, from a Greek phrase meaning something like "near the hollows," probably describing quarry pits in the ground there. The cemetery at that spot was called the cemetery at the hollows. In the Middle Ages the local name detached itself from the place and spread to every underground Christian burial gallery in the city, and then to underground cemeteries anywhere in the world. Roman Christians of the third century would have called these places coemeteria, dormitories, from the Greek verb for sleeping. That word carried the doctrine: the dead are asleep and will be woken.

The figure of more than sixty catacombs under its care is published by the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology itself. Total gallery lengths for the whole network are frequently quoted in guidebooks, they vary widely between sources, and none is given here.

Not all of the underground cemeteries of Rome are Christian. Jewish catacombs were dug on the same principle and in the same rock, and there were pagan hypogea too. Underground burial was a Roman solution to a Roman problem, adopted by several communities at once. What distinguishes the Christian catacombs is their scale, their organisation under the Roman church, and the density of what they preserve.

2. Why They Lie Outside the Walls

Every catacomb in Rome sits outside the line of the ancient city walls, and the reason is Roman law rather than Christian preference. Burial inside the sacred boundary of the city was forbidden from very early on, a prohibition already fixed in the Twelve Tables, and the rule held for centuries. The dead of Rome, pagan and Jewish and Christian alike, went out along the consular roads, and the roads out of the city became lines of tombs.

That is why a map of the catacombs is really a map of the roads. San Callisto and San Sebastiano lie along the Via Appia Antica to the south. Domitilla is a short distance west of them, off the Via Ardeatina. Priscilla is north, on the Via Salaria, the old salt road. Sant'Agnese is north-east on the Via Nomentana. Others lie on the Via Labicana, the Via Tiburtina, the Via Aurelia and the Via Ostiense. Anyone walking out of Rome in the third century passed through a landscape of graves within the first mile.

The land itself was owned. A catacomb usually began as a private burial plot belonging to a family or a benefactor, often taking that person's name, and then grew as the Christian community was given the use of it and extended the galleries. Priscilla, Domitilla and Praetextatus all carry personal names of this kind. San Callisto is the exception that proves the rule: it is named for the deacon Callixtus, who was put in charge of administering the cemetery for the Roman church under Pope Zephyrinus, and who later became pope himself. The name records a transfer of the site from private hands into the care of the Church.

The consequence matters for how you read the whole system. These were legal, registered, above-board cemeteries with entrances in the open air beside a public highway. The authorities knew where they were. During the persecution under Valerian in 257, one of the measures taken against Christians was a ban on assembling in their own cemeteries, which would be a meaningless order if the cemeteries were secret. A catacomb was as hidden as a modern graveyard is hidden.

Rome's wider pilgrim geography still follows these roads. The great basilicas outside the walls, including San Sebastiano on the Appia and Sant'Agnese on the Nomentana, were built over catacomb tombs because that is where the martyrs already were, a pattern set out in our guide to Rome pilgrimage sites and how the city is laid out for a pilgrim.

3. How a Catacomb Was Dug and Used

Catacombs were dug by a recognised trade. The workers were called fossores, diggers, and they appear in the inscriptions and even in the paintings, shown with pick and lamp. They were attached to the Church, they seem to have sold grave spaces as well as cutting them, and they knew the rock well enough to work several levels deep with hand tools and oil lamps while keeping the galleries from collapsing. Tufa is the reason the whole thing is possible: soft enough to cut with a pick, firm enough to stand without shoring.

The vocabulary of the graves

Four terms cover almost everything you will see underground, and knowing them turns a corridor of holes into a legible cemetery.

• Loculus. The standard grave: a plain rectangular slot cut horizontally into the gallery wall, long enough for a body, stacked in tiers from floor to ceiling. The body was wrapped and laid in, and the opening was closed with tiles or a marble slab bearing a name. The great majority of burials in every Roman catacomb are loculi.
• Arcosolium. A more expensive grave: a tomb sunk into the floor of a niche under a carved arch, giving a flat surface below and a curved wall above that could be painted. Most surviving catacomb frescoes are on arcosolium arches, because that is where there was a canvas.
• Cubiculum. A small room opening off a gallery, usually a family chamber holding several tombs, sometimes with painted walls and ceiling. The decorated cubicula are the rooms a guide will stop in.
• Sarcophagus. A carved stone coffin, the choice of the wealthy, sometimes placed in a chamber rather than cut into the rock. Many of the finest Christian sarcophagi from the catacombs are now in museums rather than underground.

What happened in them

Burial was only the beginning of the use. Roman families kept the anniversary of a death with a meal at the grave, the refrigerium, and Christians took the custom over and reshaped it. Small courtyards, benches, wells and dining areas appear at catacomb entrances for exactly this purpose. The anniversary of a martyr's death was kept as a birthday, the dies natalis, the day of birth into heaven, and the community gathered at the tomb. From that practice grew the calendar of saints' days the Church still keeps, and the habit of building altars over the graves of martyrs.

Bishops were buried among their people, and the liturgy was celebrated at the tombs. Pope Sixtus II was seized by soldiers in August 258 while presiding at a gathering in one of the cemeteries on the Via Appia, and was put to death, which tells you both that the liturgy happened in the catacombs and that the authorities had no difficulty finding it. The oldest accounts differ over which cemetery: the arrest is usually placed in the cemetery of Praetextatus, and his body was laid in the papal crypt at Callixtus across the road.

Christian burial practice in Rome broke with the surrounding culture on one visible point. Cremation was normal in the early empire, and Christians did not cremate. They laid the body whole in the rock and wrote in pace, in peace, over it. The body mattered because it was going to be raised, a conviction set out in our guide to the resurrection of the body. The catacombs are that doctrine turned into architecture.

4. Choosing Between the Four Open Catacombs

Four catacombs are ordinarily open to visitors with a guide, and they are genuinely different from one another. Most people have time for one, or at most two if they pair the two Appian sites. The honest way to choose is by what you want to stand in front of.

Which catacombs are open, and on what days, changes and is set by the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology and the religious communities that staff each site. Check the official listing before travelling. No opening times, prices or booking arrangements are given on this page because they change and cannot be kept accurate.

If you have half a day, San Callisto and San Sebastiano sit within walking distance of each other on the same stretch of the Appia Antica, and the two together give you the popes, the martyrs and the apostolic graffiti. If you have one hour and want the art, take Priscilla and nothing else. Domitilla suits anyone who wants to feel the sheer extent of the digging.

5. San Callisto and the Crypt of the Popes

The Catacombs of San Callisto on the Via Appia Antica are the official cemetery of the Roman church of the third century, and they are the first choice for anyone interested in the papacy and the martyrs. The complex is named for the deacon Callixtus, put in charge of it around the year 200 by Pope Zephyrinus and himself elected bishop of Rome in 217. He administered the cemetery, enlarged it, and is the reason the Church rather than a private family ended up owning the ground.

The Crypt of the Popes

The chamber that gives the site its importance is a plain rectangular room with loculi along the walls, sometimes called the Little Vatican. It was the burial place of the bishops of Rome through most of the third century. Giovanni Battista de Rossi identified it in the 1850s by matching fragments of Greek name inscriptions still attached to the tombs against the old pilgrim itineraries and the papal lists, one of the founding pieces of work in Christian archaeology. The names recovered from the crypt include Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius I, Eutychian and Sixtus II.

Sixtus II is the martyr most closely bound to this cemetery. In August 258, under the persecution of Valerian, he was arrested while presiding at a liturgy in a cemetery on the Via Appia and killed, along with deacons of the Roman church. The usual account places the arrest in the neighbouring cemetery of Praetextatus and his burial here in the papal crypt. Pope Damasus I, a century later, set a verse inscription in the crypt in honour of the martyrs buried around him, cut in the distinctive lettering designed by his calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. Damasus wrote that he had wished to be buried among them and had feared to disturb the ashes of the holy. The inscription is one of the most direct pieces of evidence there is for how the fourth-century Church regarded its own martyrs.

The crypt of St Cecilia

Next to the papal crypt is the chamber where the body of St Cecilia lay before it was carried into the city. Pope Paschal I had her remains translated to the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere in the ninth century, and a copy of Stefano Maderno's statue of the saint, carved in 1600 for that church, now lies in the empty catacomb chamber. Cecilia's own story, her martyrdom and her place as patron of musicians, belongs to our guide to St Cecilia. What the crypt adds is the physical fact of where she was first laid, in a chamber a few steps from the popes.

The Cubicles of the Sacraments

A short group of small chambers near the papal crypt carries frescoes from the first half of the third century, among the oldest Christian paintings anywhere. The scenes include a figure being baptised in water, a fish carrying a basket of bread, a banquet of seven figures at a curved table, and Moses striking water from the rock. The traditional reading takes them as a compressed catechism in pictures: water for baptism, bread and fish for the Eucharist, the meal for the messianic banquet. They were painted by people who had known Christians who had known the apostolic generation, and they show the sacramental life of the Church already in place.

6. San Sebastiano and the Graffiti to Peter and Paul

The Catacombs of San Sebastiano lie further out along the same Appian road, under the basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le mura. This is the site that gave the word catacomb to the world, because the ancient name of the place, ad catacumbas, was attached to this stretch of ground long before it meant anything general. The site is also unusual in that it never went fully out of use and out of memory the way the others did.

The triclia

The most important thing at San Sebastiano is a covered courtyard with benches, called the triclia, used for funeral meals in the middle of the third century. Its plastered walls are covered with scratched invocations left by visitors, addressed to Peter and Paul: prayers asking the two apostles to intercede, notes recording that someone held a meal there. The graffiti can be dated to roughly the 250s onward. They are the earliest direct evidence anyone has of ordinary Christians praying to the apostles by name at a shrine.

Why the cult of Peter and Paul was being kept here, on the Appia, rather than at the Vatican and on the Ostian Way where the two apostles were buried, is one of the long-running arguments of Roman archaeology. One old explanation is that the relics were moved to this spot for safety during the persecution of Valerian and later returned. Another is that this was simply a secondary memorial where the Roman community kept a joint feast of the two apostles. The evidence does not settle it, and honest accounts leave it open. What is not in doubt is that people came here to ask Peter and Paul to pray for them, and wrote it on the wall. The tomb of Peter itself is a separate subject, treated in our guide to St Peter's Basilica and the tomb beneath it.

What else is there

Three pagan mausolea from the second century survive at San Sebastiano in unusually good condition, with painted and stuccoed interiors, preserved because the ground level was later raised over them. They are worth attention precisely because they are not Christian: they show what the surrounding burial culture looked like and let you see how far the Christian tombs next door do and do not differ from it.

Above ground stands the basilica, which holds the relics of St Sebastian and was for centuries one of the seven pilgrim churches of Rome walked in a single day. The circuit was popularised by St Philip Neri in the sixteenth century, and Neri is bound up with this site in another way: he kept long night vigils in these catacombs as a young man in Rome, and the tradition of the Oratory places his Pentecost experience of 1544 here. Neri's own story is told in our guide to St Philip Neri.

7. Domitilla and Its Buried Basilica

The Catacombs of Domitilla, reached from the Via delle Sette Chiese near the Via Ardeatina, are among the most extensive of the Roman catacombs, running over several levels through a very large area of tufa. The name comes from Flavia Domitilla, a Roman noblewoman of the Flavian family whose land this was and who was exiled at the end of the first century in a case that early Christian writers understood as religious. The cemetery began as burial ground on her estate and grew into a system.

The underground basilica

What sets Domitilla apart from every other open catacomb is a church rather than a chamber. In the fourth century a basilica was built half sunk into the hillside directly over the tombs of the martyrs Nereus and Achilleus, with a nave, aisles and columns, so that the liturgy could be celebrated at the graves at proper scale. It fell into ruin and was rediscovered and excavated by de Rossi in the 1870s. Walking into it is a different experience from walking a gallery: you are standing in a basilica underground, which makes visible what the catacombs were for by the fourth century, once the persecutions had ended and the martyr shrines had become destinations.

Nereus and Achilleus were venerated as soldiers who were martyred for the faith. Damasus wrote a verse inscription for them too, in his usual manner, and fragments of it survive. Their names are still in the Roman liturgical calendar. The basilica shows the mechanism by which a grave becomes a shrine and a shrine becomes a church, the same mechanism that produced most of the ancient basilicas of Rome.

The painting

Domitilla holds a large body of fresco spread through its levels, including a well-known Good Shepherd, a young beardless figure carrying a sheep across his shoulders. The image is everywhere in catacomb art, and its meaning is plain from the Gospel: the shepherd who goes after the one that is lost and carries it home rejoicing.

There are also scenes of grain and wine harvesting, orant figures standing with arms raised in prayer, and biblical episodes chosen for their deliverance theme. Domitilla's scale means the paintings are spread thin across a long walk, which is the trade-off against Priscilla, where the best painting is concentrated.

8. Priscilla and the Earliest Christian Painting

The Catacombs of Priscilla on the Via Salaria are the ones to choose for the art. The site was called the queen of the catacombs by early explorers because of the number of martyrs believed to be buried in it, and it holds one of the densest concentrations of significant early painting of any catacomb open in Rome. It began, like the others, on private land, taking the name of Priscilla, a woman traditionally associated with the senatorial family of the Acilii, who gave the ground.

The Greek Chapel

The Cappella Greca is a decorated chamber named for two inscriptions in Greek painted on it. Its walls and vault carry a programme of biblical scenes from both Testaments: Noah in the ark, the three young men in the furnace, Susanna and the elders, the raising of Lazarus, Moses striking the rock. The selection has a logic. Almost every scene is a rescue: God pulling someone out of fire, out of water, out of a false accusation, out of the grave. Painted in a cemetery, they say one thing about the person buried below.

The chapel also holds the fresco usually called the Fractio Panis, the breaking of the bread, showing a group of figures reclining at a curved table with bread and cups, one of them reaching out to break a loaf. The scene is commonly read as a Eucharistic reference, and it is one of the earliest images of Christians at a sacred meal. The reading is not the only one available. Some scholars take it as a funeral banquet rather than a liturgical one, or as a picture of the heavenly banquet, and any careful account should say so.

The Madonna and Child

On the vault of one of the older galleries there is a painting of a seated woman holding a child at her breast, with a standing male figure beside her, one hand raised towards a star above them. The Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology describes this as the earliest known image of the Madonna and Child, and it is usually dated to the first half of the third century.

The identification as the earliest known image of the Virgin and Child is the description published by the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which has custody of the site. Academic opinion is divided about both the date and the subject, and some specialists read the standing figure as a prophet and the scene as a generic mother and child. This page reports the Commission's identification and the disagreement together.

The interpretation usually offered is that the standing figure is a prophet pointing to the star of the Messiah, either Balaam with his oracle of a star out of Jacob, or Isaiah. If the reading holds, the painting shows that Christians in Rome were depicting Mary with her Son roughly two centuries after the Nativity, which is early evidence for a devotion often assumed to be much later.

The Velatio

A second famous chamber holds the Velatio fresco, three linked scenes around a woman: in the centre she stands as an orant with arms outstretched in prayer, and to either side she appears in what are usually read as scenes of her marriage and of her with a child. The name comes from the veil. The panel has been pressed into modern arguments in both directions, and it is worth saying plainly what it does and does not show. The central figure is a woman praying, in the standard orant posture used across catacomb art for the soul of the deceased, male and female alike. The Pontifical Commission has publicly rejected the claim that this or the neighbouring frescoes depict a woman presiding at the Eucharist or being ordained. The image is a portrait of a Christian woman at prayer, which is remarkable enough.

Priscilla is staffed by a community of Benedictine sisters, and it sits north of the city away from the Appian Way circuit that most visitors walk. Anyone who wants to stand and look at a third-century painting should go here.

9. Sant'Agnese, the Jewish Catacombs and the Rest

Beyond the four main sites there is a second tier of catacombs that open on more limited terms or by arrangement, and knowing they exist prevents the impression that Rome underground consists of four tourist stops.

Sant'Agnese on the Via Nomentana

The catacomb of Sant'Agnese lies beneath the basilica of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, north-east of the centre, and holds the tomb where the young martyr Agnes was buried in the early fourth century. Constantine's daughter Constantina had a large funerary basilica built at the site, and the round mausoleum next to it, Santa Costanza, still stands with its fourth-century vault mosaics of vintaging scenes, among the earliest Christian mosaics anywhere. Agnes is one of the martyrs named in the Roman Canon of the Mass, and her feast is kept on 21 January. Her story is told in our guide to St Agnes. The combination of a catacomb, an ancient basilica and an intact imperial mausoleum on one site makes this the strongest option after the main four.

The Jewish catacombs

Rome has Jewish catacombs as well as Christian ones, at Vigna Randanini on the Appia and at Villa Torlonia on the Nomentana, and they matter for understanding the whole phenomenon. They are cut in the same rock, on the same plan, with loculi and arcosolia and painted chambers, and some of them are as old as or older than the Christian galleries. Their decoration uses the menorah, the shofar, the lulav and the ark. Their existence disposes of the idea that underground galleries were a Christian invention driven by persecution. Jewish and Christian communities in Rome were solving the same problem, of burying their dead intact and together, in the same ground and by the same method.

The closed and the specialised

Other catacombs sit outside the ordinary visiting circuit, among them San Pancrazio on the Janiculum, Praetextatus on the Appia, and the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Casilina, which hold a very large body of painted chambers. Many more are closed altogether. Excavation continues, and new painted rooms are still being cleaned and published. The catacomb system remains a working archaeological site that is still producing evidence.

All of these sit inside the wider network of Christian holy places treated in our overview of Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide, and within Italy specifically in our guide to Italy pilgrimage sites.

10. Reading the Art and the Inscriptions

Catacomb art has a small, repeating vocabulary, and once you know it the walls become readable. The painters chose images for what they said to a family standing beside a grave, so the same few scenes recur across every site with a consistent meaning.

The images that recur

• The Good Shepherd. A young man with a sheep across his shoulders. One of the commonest figures in the catacombs, drawn from Luke 15 and John 10, and readable as Christ carrying the dead person home.
• The orant. A standing figure with both arms raised and open, the ordinary posture of prayer in the ancient world. Usually the soul of the person buried there, shown already praying in peace.
• The fish. Sometimes plain, sometimes carrying bread. The Greek word for fish, ichthys, was read as an acrostic for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour, and the fish with bread carries a Eucharistic sense.
• The anchor. Hope, taken from Hebrews 6:19, which calls hope an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. Its shape also hides a cross.
• The dove, often with an olive branch. The soul at peace, and Noah's dove, the sign that the flood is over.
• Jonah. Shown in a sequence: thrown to the sea creature, spat out, resting under the gourd vine. Christ himself named the sign of Jonah for three days in the earth and rising (Matthew 12:40), so it is a resurrection image, and it is everywhere.
• Deliverance scenes. Noah, Daniel in the lions' den, the three young men in the furnace, Susanna, the raising of Lazarus, Moses striking the rock. A single argument repeated: God has rescued before and will rescue again.
• The Chi-Rho. The first two Greek letters of Christ combined into a monogram, common from the fourth century onward, often flanked by alpha and omega from Revelation 1:8.

What is largely absent is as telling as what is present. There is very little depiction of the crucifixion in the earliest catacomb painting, and very little of judgement or torment. The pictures are overwhelmingly about rescue, peace and homecoming. The people commissioning them were burying their dead in a hostile city, and what they wanted on the wall was the promise.

The epitaphs

The inscriptions are shorter and blunter than pagan epitaphs of the same period, and the difference is doctrinal. Roman tomb inscriptions often addressed the shades of the departed and dwelt on loss. Christian ones tend to read like a note left for someone who will be back. Recurring formulas include in pace, in peace; dormit in pace, he sleeps in peace; vivas in Deo, may you live in God; and depositus, laid down, a word used for something stored temporarily rather than disposed of. Ages are given in years, months and days, often for very young children, and the family scratched the name themselves when they could not afford a cut slab.

Many epitaphs are in Greek, which was still the working language of the Roman church into the third century, and the shift to Latin can be watched happening across the inscriptions. Prayers for the dead appear directly: requests that God give the person refreshment, light and peace. That practice, visible on the walls in the third century, is the ancestor of the Church's prayer for the dead and stands behind the doctrine treated in our guide to purgatory.

11. How the Catacombs Were Lost and Found

The catacombs stopped being cemeteries in the early fifth century, when Christians began burying inside the city and around the great basilicas instead. They stayed in use as shrines for several hundred years more, with pilgrims coming out to the martyrs' tombs and itineraries written to guide them. Then the countryside outside the walls became unsafe. Gothic and later Lombard incursions reached the suburbs, the tombs were plundered, and the practical answer was to bring the martyrs inside.

The translations

During the eighth and ninth centuries the popes carried out large-scale removals of relics from the suburban cemeteries into the churches of the city. Paul I and Paschal I are the names most associated with the programme. Cecilia went to Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Others went to Santa Prassede, to San Marco, to churches all over Rome. Once the relics were gone the reason for the pilgrimage was gone, the entrances silted up, vegetation covered the openings, and within a couple of centuries the catacombs were effectively forgotten. Medieval Rome knew of San Sebastiano, and very little else.

Bosio and the rediscovery

On 31 May 1578, workmen digging on the Via Salaria broke into an underground gallery full of painted chambers and inscriptions, and the discovery caused a sensation in a Rome then in the middle of the Counter-Reformation. Antonio Bosio, a Maltese lawyer working in Rome, spent more than thirty years exploring the galleries with lamps and rope, mapping and copying what he found. His Roma Sotterranea, published after his death in 1632, is the foundation of the subject, and he is generally called the Columbus of the catacombs.

De Rossi and the science

Two hundred years later Giovanni Battista de Rossi turned the exploration into a discipline. Working from the 1850s, he combined excavation with the medieval pilgrim itineraries, the papal lists and the epigraphic evidence, and used the combination to identify what he was standing in. His identification of the Crypt of the Popes at San Callisto is the classic case: he reasoned from documents to a location and then found the inscriptions that proved it. His multi-volume Roma Sotterranea Cristiana established Christian archaeology as a field, and Pope Pius IX established the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology in 1852 to take charge of the sites, which it still does.

The custody arrangement matters for how the catacombs are presented today. They belong to the Holy See, they are treated as consecrated cemeteries rather than museums, and the guides at each site are usually members of the religious community that staffs it. That is why the tone underground is closer to a church than to an exhibition, and why photography and touching are restricted.

12. Five Things People Get Wrong

The catacombs attract a great deal of misinformation, much of it inherited from nineteenth-century novels and popular histories. Five corrections cover most of it.

They were not hiding places

Christians did not live in the catacombs or hide there from the authorities. The cemeteries were registered, their entrances were visible from public roads, and the state confiscated them during persecutions precisely because it knew where they were. The image of a persecuted congregation sheltering underground comes largely from nineteenth-century fiction. What is true is that Christians assembled there for burial, for anniversaries and for the liturgy, and that doing so became dangerous when assembly at cemeteries was banned.

Not everyone buried there is a martyr

The catacombs are ordinary cemeteries holding very large numbers of ordinary Christians: infants, tradesmen, freedmen, wives, soldiers. A small number of martyrs are buried among them and their tombs became shrines. In the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries a trade grew up in bodies removed from the catacombs and sent to churches across Europe as martyrs' relics, the so-called corpisanti, often identified as martyrs on evidence as thin as a palm scratched on a slab or a glass vial found in the grave. Modern scholarship regards most of those identifications as unfounded, and the Church itself has quietly retired many of them. Saying so takes nothing from the real martyrs, whose tombs are documented.

The vials did not contain blood

Small glass vessels found sealed into some graves were long taken as ampullae of martyrs' blood, and used as the proof of martyrdom in the relic trade. Analysis of residues has generally pointed to perfume, ointment or wine used in the funeral rite rather than blood. The vial records a burial custom. It certifies nothing.

The frescoes do not show women priests

Certain paintings in Priscilla, especially the Velatio and a banquet scene, are periodically presented as evidence of women presiding at the Eucharist or being ordained in the early Roman church. The Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology has publicly rejected that reading of these particular images, and the strongest point against it is the orant posture itself, which is used throughout the catacombs for both men and women simply to mean prayer. Arguments about the ordination of women should be conducted on their proper grounds. These frescoes do not settle them in either direction.

You cannot wander them alone

Visits run on fixed routes with a guide, and the open sections are lit and maintained. The romantic picture of the wandering visitor with a candle belongs to Bosio's century. The restriction exists because the galleries are fragile, the humidity damages the frescoes, and the sites are still legally cemeteries.

13. How to Visit a Catacomb Well

A catacomb visit is short, it is underground, and it goes past very fast if you have not decided in advance what you are there for. A few practical dispositions make the difference between a tour and a pilgrimage.

Know what you are walking into

You are entering a cemetery that has never been deconsecrated, holding the graves of Christians who were baptised into the same faith you profess and who in some cases died for refusing to give it up. The proper posture is the one you would take in any graveyard, quiet, uncovered, unhurried. Silence in the galleries is asked of visitors and it is worth keeping for its own sake.

Fix on one thing

Choose in advance the one tomb or painting you want to stand in front of, and let the rest be background. At San Callisto make it the Crypt of the Popes or Cecilia's empty chamber. At Priscilla make it the Madonna and Child or the Greek Chapel. At San Sebastiano make it the graffiti in the triclia, where somebody scratched a prayer to Peter and Paul about seventeen centuries before you got there. A single point of attention is worth more than a complete circuit half-seen.

Pray for the dead, and ask the martyrs to pray for you

Two prayers fit these corridors exactly. The first is for the people in the walls, the ancient formula of eternal rest and perpetual light, which is close to what their own families scratched on their slabs. The second is the one the graffiti at San Sebastiano record: asking the martyrs to intercede. Both are ordinary Catholic practice, and both were being done in these galleries before there was a word for either. Our guide to the saints and how Catholics ask for their intercession sets out the theology behind the second.

Bring the catacombs back up with you

The thing to carry out is the perspective. The people buried here had no basilicas, no legal standing and no expectation of a comfortable life, and what they wrote on their graves was peace. Nobody knows the day or the hour of their own death or of Christ's return (Mark 13:32), and the Christians in these galleries lived and died on that basis without knowing how the story would go. Standing among them is a direct argument for getting serious now rather than later. A guide to how pilgrimage is meant to work as a spiritual practice, rather than as travel, is in our page on what a pilgrimage actually is.