I have already described to you the gate of St. Sebastian. Immediately after passing it, you enter a vineyard on the right, to see, as you are told, the Sepolcro di Marte; it is of neat brickwork; the bricks on the external facings being cut to a sharp edge, as in some other buildings which I shall describe to you: internally, we find a simple waggon-headed vault, with slight caissoons in stucco, but no other ornament; and niches for cinerary urns. After this are other fragments, all of sepulchres, for we are now on or near the Appian way. Names have been given, but without authority, and the ruins are mostly mere masses of rubble, to which no form can be assigned. Some however are larger, and contain vaulted chambers, others are domed. Indeed the form, the extent, and the materials of the more perfect remains all vary, but it would be tedious to enumerate them. On the left-hand side of the road, opposite to one of these, which is of considerable comparative importance, and formerly attributed to the Scipios, is the little church of Domine quo vadis, so called because St. Peter, having escaped from prison at Rome, met here our Saviour bearing his cross; and in these words, for he preferred Latin to Hebrew, Syriac, or Greek, asked him where he was going. Our Saviour replied that he was going to be crucified a second time. St. Peter it appears understood the hint, and returned to submit to the martyrdom required of him. This is not to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, but is not the less firmly believed on that account; and moreover you are shown the impression of our Saviour’s foot in the stone on which he stood. It was politic, at least, to weave all these little circumstances into the history of St. Peter; they became united to all the earliest impressions of the Romans, and are easily connected with the idea of St. Peter having been bishop of Rome, and of the consequent superior dignity and authority of that church.
There is nothing to claim your attention in the architecture of the Church of St. Sebastian; but in a subterraneous chapel is a beautiful bust of the saint, by Bernini, full of expression; and here also is the entrance to the most extensive catacombs about Rome. They consist of crooked winding passages in tufo and pozzolana, in three stories, which as the levels are not always exactly preserved, are easily made into seven by those who wish to increase the appearance of the marvellous. The niches for the bodies are mere square recesses, about the length of a human body, and just big enough to receive it; but there are some larger ones forming an arch, at the bottom of which the body was placed: wherever these larger arched niches are found, there is a little apartment, whose rude sides have been coated with stucco. I will not however venture to say that there are no stuccoed rooms without niches, but the two circumstances generally go together. They pretend to have found here, the bodies of 174,000 martyrs. A collection of itself sufficient to stock all Europe with relicks.
A little beyond this is the Spoliarium, or Mutatorium; or it is a temple, according to Palladio, or anything else you please. It has been generally supposed to have supplied some purpose dependent on the circus of Caracalla, with which it has however no connexion. It consists of a round edifice inclosed in a court. The central building is formed by a circular wall, with an octagonal pier in the middle supporting a vault; the whole forming doubtless the basement of a large domed hall above, which no longer exists. The work is of rubble, which within the vault is faced with bricks, laid regularly, but with a great deal of mortar; the vault is altogether of rubble. There are niches in the middle pier, and its octagonal form seems not essential, since the vault rises upon a circle described within it. The surrounding wall of the court is built of alternate layers of brick and stone, or rather of tufo, for it hardly deserves the name of stone. Within it, are remains of piers formed of brick only, and there are some vestiges of the vaulting with which the intervening space was covered, forming a continued arcade round three sides of the court, or perhaps all four, but that towards the road is quite destroyed. Close on the outside of this court is a sepulchre, long attributed to the Servilian family, but as the true burying-place of that family has been since found at a considerable distance, and determined by inscriptions, this remains without a name. It is of a square form without and within, and is covered, not with a proper vault, but pyramidally, on the principle of the dos d’âne. There are, however, rough arches to some of the openings; a passage is carried all round the building in the thickness of the walls. The whole construction is certainly very singular, and appears to be of high antiquity, but I cannot pretend to assign a probable date.
From these remains we pass to the Circus of Caracalla, not that it was built by that emperor, for it is probably of a much later period, but it was known from medals that Caracalla erected a circus, and the antiquaries could not tell where to find it, while here they had a circus without a name. Whoever built it, it is a very interesting ruin, because it exhibits more perfectly than any other, the arrangement of the ancient circus. The surrounding walls are constructed like those of the court of the mutatorium, with alternate layers of brick and small stones; the continued vault which supported the seats, is of rubble, but with large earthen vases in the upper part, to lighten the work. The line of Carceres which forms the square end, if I may use the word square so loosely, is oblique in position with respect to the side walls, and curved in itself, in order to put all the chariots upon an equality at starting; and the spina for a similar reason is neither along the middle of the arena, nor exactly parallel to one of its sides, but so disposed that the passage gets narrower through its whole progress. At the semicircular end is the Porta Triumphalis,[[6]] through which the victor left the circus. The obelisk which now embellishes the Piazza Navona, once decorated the spine of this place.
Overlooking this circus, are various ruins, of which we may reckon five distinct fragments, each at some distance from the other; and a long terrace, supported in part upon vaults, to one of which you still find an entrance. The stucco is still remaining, and we observe painted lines drawn very neatly and correctly round panels, of which the ornaments in the middle have been taken away: from what remains, we may conclude that the whole was well finished. Some of these fragments of edifices have been supposed to belong to the temple of Honour and Virtue, built by Marcellus, after the conquest of Sicily, in the year of Rome 544; for this, however, there is not the shadow of proof, and the style of construction, of rubble faced with brick, is similar to that of imperial times.
We will now make a diversion from the road, in order to visit some antiquities which occupy a retired situation to the left, in or near the little valley called the Caffarelli. The first we meet with, just on the brow of the hill, is the little edifice called the Temple of the Tempest. There are some small buildings about Rome, covered with the sort of vault which the French call dos d’âne, but I do not know that we have any correspondent English term. The rubble and mortar of which it is composed, seem to have been laid on planks rising in a triangular form, and to sustain themselves when these are removed, entirely by the cement. This little building is one of them. It is said to have been erected A. U. C. 547, (before C. 206.) by P. C. Scipio, in consequence of a vow which he made when overtaken by a storm in returning from Spain; and I have observed two tombs, one of which I have just described to you, the roof of which is constructed on the same principle, in the form of the frustum of a pyramid; both very much dilapidated. I am inclined to attribute to all three a high antiquity, probably as high as that assigned by tradition to the temple of the Tempest; but of this building I must observe, that only a small part can by any possibility boast a claim to the name: additions have been made at different times. The oldest part is formed of rubble-work, of fragments of lava; the later (and these walls are built close against the others) of a rubble-work of tufo, faced with reticulated work, and since that, a dwellinghouse has been erected on the top, which is now in ruins. At a little distance is a building called the Temple of Bacchus, or by Uggeri, and some others, the Temple of Honour and Virtue. Four Corinthian columns of pretty good design and workmanship form the front, but they are spaced wide apart, and surmounted by a miserable architrave. Above this is what may be considered as an enormous frieze, which, as well as the cornice, is of brick. On one side is a fragment of a wall of alternate brick and tufo, not close against the wall of the temple, or parallel to it. The walls of the present building are all brick, at least as to the facing; and in converting it to a church, the spaces between the columns have been filled up with an ill-built wall of brick, and fragments of stone. The original brickwork is neat and good, but the bricks are not cut to a sharp edge, as they are in some other examples. Internally, a range of stones projecting from the walls, forms a series of corbels supporting flat arches of brick: above every alternate stone is a pilaster, and there were probably columns below, so that it was a room adorned with two orders of architecture. Some stucco panels remain on the vault, and along the springing there is a row of trophies in considerable relief. The columns alone belong to a building of good time, but the edifice, in its first state, is probably not much earlier than Constantine, and perhaps later: the alterations and conversion into a church are not recorded; we only see the fact. Something was done in 1634, but I do not know what.
Below this, in the valley, is the Grotto of the nymph Egeria, a cavern, perhaps originally formed by nature in the side of the hill, but enlarged and made regular by art, and the soft rock everywhere covered with brick, and reticulated work. It appears to have been formed into a symmetrical building adorned with niches; in one of which, at the end of the grotto, is a fragment of a male statue. The supply of water is but small, but the vault and walls, covered with the beautiful Adiantum Capillus Veneris, show the general moisture of the soil.
Continuing down the valley, we meet with the Temple of Rediculus: the body of the work is of rubble, but it is faced with very neat brickwork, in which the horizontal surfaces of the bricks have been rubbed or cut away, in order to give room for the mortar, when the edges externally were almost in contact, as in the tomb called the sepulchre of Mars, and in some others near the mutatorium, which I have not particularly mentioned. I did not observe that any of the bricks were broken in consequence of this process, an effect which I think would certainly follow if a modern architect were to direct such a mode of proceeding. It has Corinthian pilasters at the back, which is the most conspicuous part, the foliage of whose capitals is also cut in brick. On one side are portions of two octagonal columns recessed in the wall, while the other side is plain. It has windows; and many of the ornaments round them, and in the cornice, and also a band, ornamented with a fret, which surrounds the edifice between the pilasters, seem to have been moulded in the clay, before being burnt. There are evident traces of a portico, towards the streamlet which waters the valley, so that the whole together must have formed a complete little prostyle temple. Within, the vault which separates the basement, from what would have been on such a supposition the floor of the temple, is broken away; and in this basement, on the west side, or end, is a row of small arches, which some antiquaries say are not parts of the building, but have been put up to support fodder for the cattle. As, however, traces of similar arches may be observed in the construction of the wall on the south side, whose surface is destroyed, I suspect that they were for the reception of cinerary urns. Whatever was the purpose of the erection, there are several buildings of a similar disposition about Rome, and therefore probably intended for a similar object. Most of them have been supposed to be temples, but I believe all contain appearances in the basement story, (for each has a basement story) of having been used as places of sepulture after burning: yet they are not placed immediately on the great roads, as sepulchres usually were, nor is there any certain sepulchre in which this form has been adopted. This little building was probably of as correct a design, and of as finished an execution, as any of them; and by a fortunate coincidence is the best preserved.
A. B. Clayton del. from Sketches by J. Woods