Catacombs and the Underground

One of the places I actually really, really wanted to go (even though I knew I wouldn't get a chance to do so) was the Catacombs.  These were the underground caves and tunnels which held the sewers and aqueducts of the Roman Empire, where Christians used to hide from persecution and used to bury their dead.  More recently, some of them have been used as temples for Catholic and pagan groups worshiping in death cults.

The reason that I knew that I wouldn't get to see the catacombs was because the main entrance to the catacombs was about  5 kilometers, or about a 40 minute walk away.  (In the map below, B is the Colosseum and A is the Catacomb entrance.)  Given the limited amount of time that I had there, there just wasn't any way to see this, but I thought that it would be a lot of fun.

You can see the some of the history of the catacombs in Rome, here, and of the Catacomb of Callixius--or San Callisto--which are the catacombs marked on the map above, here.

This is a picture of the catacombs from Wikipedia Commons.

In the interest of learning more about the catacombs though, I did a little research.  The video below is a tour of these same catacombs done by Rick Steves, who is a very famous travel guide and writer (in fact, my Italian lanaguage guide, which I took with me when I traveled, was written by Rick Steves).  The second half of the 5 minute video is about the Apian Way (which I will talk about later) but the first half is specifically about the Christian burials in the Catacombs and is quite interesting.


This is 3:50 video has a lot of the history of the Catacombs of Callixius and is quite interesting.


This little two minute video (which is also an advertisement for a book on this subject which seems very interesting) discusses the kinds of artwork that you can see in the catacombs, some of which illustrate Bible stories and some of which show scenes of contemporary life and with illustrations of the vocations of the people buried there.


This video (5:28 minutes) talks about a different set of catacombs, named after St. Steven--the one who was killed by being shot to death with arrows, as you can see from the statue of him below.


The History Channel actually has a couple of videos about the aqueduct--I think that they are clips of a larger show.  Also, one of them deals specifically with the Catacombs in Naples, not Rome, but, since I was also in Naples, I think it counts.  (The Catacombs at Naples were also on my list of things to see, but I could not figure out how to work them into my schedule.)  You do have to watch an advertisement before each video but I think that they are pretty interesting (they are both only about 2 minutes long).  This video talks about the history of the catacombs, from two thousand years ago through WWII, which was quite interesting (just as a warning, though, the host does swear a few times, so use discretion).  This video is about the actual engineering that went into providing a water supply for a large city--which is astounding--and the video is quite well done.