Walks in Rome

by Augustus J. C. Hare

The road we now traverse is the scene of the legend of Plautilla.

"St. Paul was beheaded by the sword outside the Ostian gate, about two miles from Rome, at a place called the Aqua Salvias, now the 'Tre Fontane.' The legend of his death relates that a certain Roman matron named Plautilla, one of the converts of St. Peter, placed herself on the road by which St. Paul passed to his martyrdom, to behold him for the last time; and when she saw him she wept greatly, and besought his blessing. The apostle then, seeing her faith, turned to her, and begged that she would give him her veil to blind his eyes when he should be beheaded, promising to return it to her after his death. The attendants mocked at such a promise, but Plautilla, with a woman's faith and charity, taking off her veil, presented it to him. After his martyrdom, St. Paul appeared to her, and restored the veil stained with his blood.

"In the ancient representations of the martyrdom of St. Paul, the legend of Plautilla is seldom omitted. In the picture by Giotto in the sacristy of St. Peter's, Plautilla is seen on an eminence in the background, receiving the veil from the hands of St. Paul, who appears in the clouds above; the same representation, but little varied, is executed in bas-relief on the bronze doors of St. Peter's."—Jameson's Sacred Art.

The lane which leads to the Tre Fontane turns off to the left a little beyond S. Paolo.

"In all the melancholy vicinity of Rome, there is not a more melancholy spot than the Tre Fontane. A splendid monastery, rich with all the offerings of Christendom, once existed there: the ravages of that mysterious scourge of the Campagna, the malaria, have rendered it a desert; three ancient churches and some ruins still exist, and a few pale monks wander about the swampy dismal confines of the hollow in which they stand. In winter you approach them through a quagmire; in summer, you dare not breathe in their pestilential vicinity; and yet there is a sort of dead beauty about the place, something hallowed as well as sad, which seizes on the fancy."—Jameson's Sacred Art.

The convent was bestowed in 1867 by Pius IX. upon the French Trappists, and twelve brethren of the Order went to reside there. Entering the little enclosure, the first church on the right is Sta. Maria Scala Cœli, supposed to occupy the site of the cemetery of S. Zeno, in which the 12,000 Christians employed in building the Baths of Diocletian were buried. The present edifice was the work of Vignola and Giacomo della Porta in 1582. The name is derived from the legend that here St. Bernard had a vision of a ladder which led to heaven, its foot resting on this church, and of angels on the ladder leading upwards the souls whom his prayers had redeemed from purgatory. The mosaics in the apse were the work of F. Zucchero, in the sixteenth century, and are perhaps the best of modern mosaics. They represent the saints Zeno, Bernard, Vincenzo, and Anastasio, adored by Pope Clement VIII. and Cardinal Aldobrandini, under whom the remodelling of the church took place.

The second church is the basilica of SS. Vincenzo ed Anastasio, founded by Honorius I. (625), and restored by Honorius III. (1221), when it was consecrated afresh. It is approached by an atrium with a penthouse roof, supported by low columns, and adorned with decaying frescoes, among which the figure of Honorius III. may be made out. The interior, which reeks with damp, is almost entirely of the twelfth century. The pillars are adorned with coarse frescoes of the apostles.

"S. Vincenzo alle Tre Fontane so far deviates from the usual basilican arrangement as almost to deserve the appellation of gothic. It has the same defect as all the rest—its pier arches being too low, for which there is no excuse here; but both internally and externally it shows a uniformity of design, and a desire to make every part ornamental, that produces a very pleasing effect, although the whole is merely of brick, and ornament is so sparingly applied as only just to prevent the building sinking to the class of mere utilitarian erections."—Fergusson's Handbook of Architecture, vol. ii.

The two saints whose relics are said to repose here were in no wise connected in their lifetime. S. Vincenzo, who suffered A.D. 304, was a native of Saragossa, cruelly tortured to death at Valencia, under Dacian, by being racked on a slow fire over a gridiron, "of which the bars were framed like scythes." His story is told with horrible detail by Prudentius. Anastasius, who died A.D. 628, was a native of Persia, who had become a Christian and taken the monastic habit at a convent near Jerusalem. He was tortured and finally strangled, under Chosroes, at Barsaloe, in Assyria. He is not known to be represented anywhere in art, save in the almost obliterated frescoes in the atrium of this church.

The third church, S. Paolo alle Tre Fontane, was built by Giacomo della Porta for Cardinal Aldobrandini in 1590. It contains the pillars to which St. Paul is said to have been bound, the block of marble upon which he is supposed to have been beheaded, and the three fountains which sprang forth, wherever the severed head struck the earth during three bounds which it made after decapitation. In proof of this story, it is asserted that the water of the first of these fountains is still warm, of the second tepid, of the third cold. Three modern altars above the fountains are each decorated with a head of the apostle in bas-relief.