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TLC Salon: Featured Church / Roman Forum

2/22/2015

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I’d visited the Roman Forum a number of times before, starting before the city of Rome fenced it in and began charging visitors to walk the same stones that Cleopatra and Marc Antony walked, to gaze on the steps of the Senate where Julius Caesar died, to stand beneath the ruins of the Temple of Saturn and marvel at its unimaginable former splendor. When they started charging, I visited less, but who needs to walk those ancient stones every morning on the way to coffee anyway? Once or twice a week was enough.


So while I can’t say I knew the Forum inside and out, I knew it well enough to know that the mosaic I glimpsed on the ceiling of a church I had barely noticed before, was new. Well, not new new. Nothing in Rome really is, and especially not in the very heart of it. But new to my eyes.

My heart stopped as my feet did, and I searched frantically for a way in to the church, or temple, before me. It’s bronze doors did not yield, it’s hexagonal design defied my attempts at finding another entrance, and finally I had to conclude that there was no way in. At least, not from the ground level. (I later learned that these doors are kept locked, they can be opened with a key – the original key that locked those doors for the first time in the 4th century. A 1700 year old key in a 1700 year old lock.)

I left, determined to find my way in. I didn’t – not that year. But the following summer I returned, knowing some things. For instance, that it’s the oldest church in the Roman Forum, originally created in 527 by Pope Felix. I say created, not built, because the structure was there and Pope Felix added an apse mosaic – the one that had caught my eye, in fact – and some basic church-ey furnishings. And that this act of changing a temple into a church signaled the fact that the Church was finally more powerful than the pagan beliefs that had until then dominated. I learned that its name is the Basilica of Santi Cosma e Damiano, and that these two men were twin brothers, physicians both, and that for centuries sick people came to the church to sleep within its walls in the belief that so doing would cure them of whatever they suffered from. And I learned that the entrance is outside of the Forum, from the Via dei Fori Imeperiali – the street that runs beside the Coliseum.

So in I went, and like a pilgrim I walked straight to the part of the interior from which it is possible to stare open-mouthed, and I’m sure I did, at the mosaics that had by then haunted my dreams for a year. Masterpieces of 6th- and 7th-century Byzantine-style art, these mosaics show Christ’s second coming. Christ himself is in the center, with Saint Peter presenting Saint Cosmas and Saint Theodorus (right), and Saint Paul presenting Saint Damian and Pope Felix IV. The entire is brilliantly colored; blue and gold predominate, with reds and whites and greens as secondary hues.

We are not so well versed in how to read the stories told to us on Church ceilings as people of the past have been. Sheep and the temples in Jerusalem and the four rivers of Paradise and clouds and scrolls and crowns and golden water and palm trees and phoenixes and thrones seem jumbled, and to my eyes become less about a perfect story than about sublime beauty. It’s hard to believe, and yet so perfectly apt – we’re in Rome, after all – that these vivid colors have survived 1400 + years, that the story they tell is one that still gets told, and that the dome and the heavens are somehow not actually the same thing.


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TLC Salon - Featured Church - of Saints James and Christopher, Bisentina Island

2/13/2015

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On the island of Bisentina in the lake of Bolsena, northern Lazio, Italy, is a church. Actually there are seven churches on this island, but only one of them matters to me. And I can’t stop thinking of it because I’ve never seen it up close. I’ve sailed around it often and from the deck of a boat, the structure is half-hidden by vegetation, visible only in parts. Vines climb the walls, and its dome emerges from the trees, a large, leaning cross on its top. These glimpses jolt me with a sense of desire so strong I can only liken it to the emotion that drew me to Italy in the first place. I’ve written about that emotion (here), and this church causes the same sensation that is made up of equal parts fear, need, loss and a strange nostalgia for something I have never touched – perhaps indeed because it is unattainable, unreachable, untouchable.

It’s not for lack of trying. The church, and the other structures on the island, and in fact the island itself, are privately owned and while at one time not long ago it was possible to visit by hopping on a ferry or joining a group who were planning to picnic, sometime in the last ten years the owners of the place shut down that possibility. Rumor has it that a part of one of the churches – perhaps this one that I dream of – fell near an unsuspecting tourist, almost causing great physical harm and resulting in a complete shutdown of anyone else’s visitation rights. It seems somewhat uncharitable that I would blame that tourist for my never having set foot on the island, but I do nonetheless.

Some quick history. The island is the larger of two in the middle of Lago Bolsena, a volcanic lake in northern Lazio. From the 9th century the island was a haven for people escaping ‘barbarians,’ and has passed in the centuries since through the hands of popes and rich families (often the same groups), who used it for summer vacations, hunting, and idyllic getaways. Because no one is allowed there today, the island maintains a large diversity of plant and animal life. It is currently (as much as can be discerned online) owned by Princess Angelica of the Dragon, but as far as I can tell she is a mythical creature, hardly seen or heard of.

The church that haunts my desires, one of seven on the island, is called the Church of Saints James and Christopher. It was built in the 16th Century by the Farnese family, friends of popes. It is in the shape of a cross, as was typical. The dome is of iron, and often attributed to Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola – one of the three most famous Renaissance architects. He worked with Michelangelo, and had a part in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, but while it would be nice to think he created this dome on the church of my dreams, he was dead by the time it was built. As mentioned, its walls are covered with vines and flowers, and the whole is juxtaposed with beautifully kept gardens; the Princess employs a veritable fleet of gardeners to maintain the grounds for no one.

Inside, by all accounts, are frescoes as beautiful as any 500 year old frescoes can be, neither more nor less amazing than any other church. This should be a comfort really, and take some of the sting out of my inability to see them. And of course Italy is full of ancient churches, far more than I’ll ever be able to see up close. None of this helps, and my desire only grows.

I’m not sure why this one pulls at me the way it does, or what I hope to find when I finally am able to walk on its manicured lawns, enter the shadow of its ancient doorways, walk on its marble floors and drink in the frescoes painted by long-ago hands. But I trust this inner knowledge that it’s worth the attempt. And oh yeah, the entire island is guarded by a stone lion. That must mean something.



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    Teresa Cutler-Broyles
    Traveler / Writer / Educator

    I've been writing since I was 8 years old, traveling since I was 18, and teaching since age 30. Fell in love with Italy in 2000, and began combining my four passions in 2008 with TLC Writing Tours. Enjoy my musings about Travel, Writing, Teaching, and Italy - in no particular order.

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