At the end of your visit to the Aventine (see "Tours" for the Aventine and Santa Sabina), you will want to linger in the Parco Savello, also called the Orange Garden, a lovely public park next to Santa Sabina which has a terrace that provides a peerless view of Rome, from St. Peter’s in the distance to the Campidolgio, the massive Victor Emmanuel Monument, and beyond. But an even more evocative view is next to the Parco, just to the left as you exit on the sidewalk--the Clivo di Rocca Savella, a secluded cobblestoned walkway gently leading down the Aventine, the towering wall on the left a remnant of the Savelli fortress and the wall on the right protecting private residences from intruders and curious tourists. The narrow bricks of the former fortress undoubtedly came from ancient ruins, perhaps from a temple or mansion, and its soaring height as you descend the Clivo gives a better idea of its original size than do the modest ruins visible in the Parco. Trees provide welcome shade, and the lower parts of the walls are overgrown with grass and shrubs. This ally looks much the way it did several centuries ago, when the Aventine was isolated in the overgrown disabitato, the large swath of Rome that had been abandoned from the early Middle Ages until modern times. Midway down the hill is a priceless view of the city, with the Victor Immanuel Monument overshadowing the Campidoglio to the right and the old part of the city to the left. The peace and calm can make you feel as if you’re an eighteenth-century visitor on the Grand Tour, leisurely strolling through the countryside. But your reverie abruptly ends at the foot of the hill, where the walkway opens onto a busy street and the cacophony of modern Rome. Turn to the right, walk along the narrow sidewalk to the nearby intersection, and pause to take in what at one time was one of the most important areas—perhaps the most important area—of ancient Rome, a site that goes back to the very beginnings of the city. At first glance, the busy intersection, clogged with an unending procession of speeding cars and motorcycles, seems like just another Italian version of the races in the ancient Circus Maximus—a former mayor of Rome once quipped that Rome will someday “die from traffic”--but there is much more to behold here, namely the very origin and foundation of the city that someday would rule the known world and later rule people’s minds and souls for over fifteen centuries after its fall.

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In front of you, with its towering twelfth-century bell tower—the tallest such Medieval belfry in Rome, decorated with multicolored marble plaques certainly taken from ancient ruins--is the well-trodden church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, which, as we will see, is not just another beautiful Medieval Christian basilica with its own unique history, but is a multilayered, ever-changing site of worship which goes back nearly a thousand years before it was consecrated as a place of Christian worship. Indeed, buried deep into Santa Maria in Cosmedin is what most likely was a highly revered open-air alter to Hercules, erected five centuries before Christ. Unless a UFO landing at the nearby Circus Maximus has attracted the tourist hordes, there will be a long line of people in front of the church’s portico, not waiting to enter its becalming interior but rather queuing to see (and be photographed with) the Boca della Verita’ in the corner of the portico, which, as we shall see, is one of the more absurd checkoffs on tourists’ bucket lists (but not on ours!).

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Across the street from Santa Maria in Cosmedin is a small open park where two very ancient Roman temples are standing largely intact as they have been for over two thousand years—no need to use your imagination to piece together fragments of columns and crumbling foundations to visualize these amazing survivors which were already several centuries old when Christ was born. This entire area was once the Forum Boarium, Rome’s cattle market, and according to tradition, was the area the infant twins Romulus and Remus washed ashore to be suckled by a wolf. The legend says that they were sentenced to death by a jealous king but instead were spared by a servant who put them in a basket and cast it into the Tiber, destined to meet a friendly she-wolf. Just down the road beyond the two temples, past the staid neo-Fascist government buildings, you can see the area that was once the Forum Holitorium, the fruit and vegetable market. The Tiber River is just to your left, on the other side of the embankment and busy road coursing above the two temples—in ancient times, it flowed closer to these temples, the topography making this area easily accessible to the river. In very early times, the area before you was probably a swamp, but after Rome was settled, it was where a seemingly unending procession of ships docked with cargos of grain, olives, fruit, and vegetables. Even before the Roman Forum became the "Times Square" of ancient Rome, with its monumental edifices of empire, the Forum Boarium and Forum Holitorium were the oldest and most important fora in the city, teeming with traders, shopkeepers replenishing their stock, ordinary citizens buying food for their homes, and, later during the empire, imperial officials requisitioning grain for the storehouses of the imperial palace and for feeding the hundreds of thousands of citizens who were on the dole. Ancient sources report that a bronze statue of a bull, possibly Greek in origin, was in the center of the marketplace—on our tour of the Capitoline Museums there are fragments of the hindquarters of a bronze bull, probably much like the one that was here. Streets radiated from the two fora to all parts of the city.

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Feeding Rome was a major enterprise—there was no refrigeration or long-distance transportation by land--and over the centuries the Roman state had evolved a highly organized system for provisioning the city. By the time of Augustus, everyone assumed that it was the emperor’s responsibility to feed the city, and either free grain for the poorest or subsidized grain sold at a discount for almost everyone else was regarded as an essential right. In fact, the main reason scholars can estimate the city’s population to have been a million at its zenith is that a high official in 23 B.C. wrote that he had arranged the distribution of free grain to 250,000 heads of household, each of which probably had several other mouths to feed. In the third century, the emperors added olive oil, pork, and wine to the imperial largess. The infrastructure to store all this food was impressive: further down the river were immense warehouses and numerous docks for the ships ferrying grain from Sicily, North Africa, and, above all, Egypt, and throughout the city were equally grand storehouses. It was cheaper to ship grain to Rome via the sea than to transport it over land. The ships were wind-driven—no oarsmen slaving away as in Ben Hur—and the trip from Egypt to Rome usually took several months. Protecting the sea lanes from pirates was a major priority, and many of the grain ships doubled as navy vessels. The state’s role in guaranteeing the city’s grain supply dwindled and finally disappeared in the late fifth or early sixth centuries—when the aqueducts were shut off in the Gothic Wars of the sixth century, the flour mills floating on the Tiber shut down, and the procession of ships from Africa ended. By then the Church was stepping in to organize the food supply for the much-contracted, largely impoverished population of Rome, and soon thereafter for the influx of pious pilgrims visiting the city’s holy sites (and bringing much needed money to the Church). In fact, the church in front of us, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, was possibly built directly into an immense building that, according to numerous guidebooks and online articles, was the ancient statio annonae, one of the city’s major food distribution centers. However, very little about ancient Rome is definite—very little about anything here is known with certainty--and lately some archeologists have cast doubt on this widely held assumption, claiming that the statio was actually at the foot of the nearby Aventine and that the ancient structure Santa Maria in Cosmedin was built into was a shrine to Hercules, built next to his great altar. Other experts claim it was a temple to Ceres and Proserpine. Regardless, as we shall see inside the church, the mammoth columns of the statio, or of the shine to Hercules or whatever other structure it once was, comprise a powerful skeleton that has supported the church for over fifteen centuries.

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Cross the street towards the church—if you obey the pedestrian signal and are not timid, motorists turning to the right will slow down for you. (Italian drivers don’t want to maim you—they just want you to get out of their way.) At the entranceway is a small square porch from the Middle Ages, supported by four mismatched ancient columns with Ionic capitals, all fairly uninspiring and emblematic of the desperate times in which they were purloined from a nearby building. There is almost always a long queue of tourists waiting to see in the left end of the atrium the so-called Bocca della Verita’, the Mouth of Truth, a large marble disc, weighing over a ton and of very ancient origin (perhaps the first century B.C.), on which is carved a man’s face with a slightly open mouth. Except for the facts that it was first mentioned by its present name in 1485, was set up in its present position in the early seventeenth century, and consists of valuable marble from Asia Minor (present day Turkey), nothing of any certainty is known about it, including when it was discovered and what its original function was. Perhaps it was the cover to a cistern or sewer—but the high-quality marble argues against this--or a fountainhead in the luxurious garden of a nearby ancient palace or mansion, or a screen in a temple where, in Wizard of Oz fashion, the priest would pretend to be the god. As with most things in Rome, no one knows. The origin of its name is from the tradition that during trials in the Middle Ages, the accused would put their hand in the mouth while giving testimony, and if they lied, the Mouth of Truth would chop it off. But experts in Medieval trial-by-ordeal discount this story as fanciful. Scholars also wonder why such a nice artifact from ancient times hadn’t been scarfed up by a Renaissance nobleman for his own garden. Perhaps the most plausible explanation was that enterprising Medieval Romans, perhaps even Santa Maria’s clerics, used it as curiosity to exhibit—for a small fee, of course—its fearsome visage and hand-eating history to gullible pilgrims visiting the Eternal City. Similar ancient remnants—the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, for example—were turned into money-making attractions for pilgrims. But as you enter the church, don’t let the pressing crowd at the doorway deter you from stopping to notice the two marble slabs on each side of the eleventh-century marble door frame, which is carved with intricate classical motifs. The tablets are very old—one eighth century and the other tenth century—and their Latin inscriptions celebrate donations that certain men, most likely of noble lineage, made to surrounding churches, now long vanished. As you enter the church, the sacristy gift shop is to your right—you should stop there on your way out to see another Medieval masterpiece (see below)--and the nave of the basilica is to your left. Be sure to mind the small step into the nave. 

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After getting through the gauntlet of noisy tourists milling outside, walking into the central nave can be a bit disorienting: you feel overwhelmed by the amalgam of ancient and Medieval features of the church. Whereas Santa Sabina and San Saba on the nearby Aventine have simple and pristine atmospheres—serenely august classical harmony in the case of Santa Sabina and bare bones Medieval austerity with San Saba—Santa Maria in Cosmedin’s complexity of different styles and aesthetics demands much more attention and awareness. The recording of Byzantine chant which is usually playing softly in the background suffuses the space with a mystical glow, as befits a church that was founded for Greek and Middle Eastern Christians in Rome. As with so many other churches in Rome, the actual founding of Santa Maria in Cosmedin was never documented—or, more accurately, if any such historical record existed, it perished long ago. But there is little doubt that it was established by and for the Greek community in Rome that existed during the Byzantine rule of the sixth and seventh centuries, when most of the bishops of Rome were Greek with close ties to the imperial court in Constantinople—the emperor there often micromanaged the papacy back then, and the papal court was dominated by Greek speakers. The moniker “cosmedin” is derived from the Greek word Kosmedion, which means beautiful, an apparent reference to the church’s dazzling beauty in the Middle Ages, echoes and traces of which have persisted through the many centuries. However, other scholars think Kosmedion refers to a prominent fifth century monastery in Constantinople, from which Greek monks fled during the eighth-century iconoclastic controversy embroiling the Byzantine Empire, when emperors outlawed the worship of images of saints, equating such veneration with pagan idolatry. In addition to Greek refugees fleeing the iconoclastic persecutions in the east, there were Greek merchants, traders, soldiers and imperial officials who also needed a church home as well. It’s likely that as early as the sixth century, when Rome’s government was crumbling, some sort of religious order had taken over the statio annonae (or temple of Hercules) and built into part of it an oratory or deaconry which doled out food to the city’s impoverished inhabitants. Some experts posit that in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great (590-604 A.D.) converted the deaconry into an actual church, but--Rome being Rome and thus largely inscrutable--there is no documentary evidence to support this theory. What we do know is that in the eighth century, Pope Hadrian tore down the deaconry and part of the statio (or temple) and built a proper church on the site. Despite numerous renovations and alterations—starting with repairs from the great 847 earthquake—Hadrian’s church probably had the same layout we see today, with nine ancient columns on each side of the nave topped by different capitals and separated into groups of three by two large pillars that are part of the upper nave wall, the latter suggesting that early on there were structural problems that necessitated the pillars. In the left aisle towards the front are several instructive placards describing the origins of the church, including its floor plan which shows that it is not perfectly rectangular and rather is slightly trapezoidal. In the wall above the left row of columns are areas where the modern masonry has been intentionally removed to show the original bricks, undoubtedly from some ancient structure. The three apses at the front of the sanctuary were a typical Byzantine touch, as was the construction of a matronium, an upper level gallery for women, which was removed in a twelfth-century renovation after the church was damaged by the Norman sack of Rome in 1084.

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Being on the very outer fringe of the inhabited area of Medieval Rome—the densely overgrown disabitato was essentially at the church’s doorstep--Santa Maria in Cosmedin was probably not a popular assignment for priests, and during the Middle Ages it suffered from periodic cycles of neglect and disrepair alternating with renovation and repair. As with many ancient and early Medieval churches in Rome, there was the usual frilly Baroque refurbishment installed in the eighteenth century, followed by the nineteenth century attempt to restore it to its original pristine state. All the while, as these multiple renovations and reincarnations were brought about, the entire edifice has been continuously supported by the massive fluted columns with elegant Corinthian capitals, towering behemoths that were part of the original ancient building the church was built into: two columns are at the very back of the church, flanking the original doorway, three are on the leftmost wall, two are at the entrance to the sacristy to support the bell tower, and another is actually in the sacristy. In the back of the church, on both sides of the door, are two black granite stones, ancient weights that were used as standards to weigh produce and most likely were in nearby temples before being moved to the church—you can only imagine the haggling and negotiating by merchants from across the empire that transpired across these stones.

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Sitting on one of the benches at the back, you can better appreciate the Medieval additions to the church. Arrayed before you is the intricate Cosmatesque pavement, a mosaic of multi-colored stones installed by the Cosmati family in the eleventh century, the center of which is a large purple porphyry disc, sawn from what was once an immense ancient column. Since porphyry marble, mined from a quarry in the eastern desert of Egypt, was largely reserved for imperial use, it’s not a stretch of fantasy to muse that the column might have once stood in the nearby imperial palace. Other colored marble pieces in the pavement, probably made from smashing columns and marble decorations from ancient ruins, hailed from other Roman provinces across the Mediterranean. These stones have been worn and chipped over the past thousand years by parishioners, pilgrims, and tourists, but it’s not too difficult to imagine how the floor once gleamed with bright colors as flickering overhead lamps illuminated the floor designs. As befitted its nickname cosmedin, the church was probably once a riot of color, enchanting all who entered. At the top of the nave walls are tantalizing fragments of twelfth-century frescos, now faded and shadowy, but in their time these paintings comprised a cinematic panorama of biblical scenes for people whose harsh and dreary lives were far from colorful.

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Cosmatesque flooring, even more intricate in design, extends into the marble schola cantorum, another Medieval treasure that enclosed the singers during mass. The marble panels of the schola are polished slabs of high quality, some with blue-cheese-like veins, and it doesn’t take a degree in art history to deduce that they once were probably part of an important ancient building, perhaps a temple or palace. The Forums Boarium and Holitorium were once teeming with temples, ripe for plunder for decorating the numerous churches popping up throughout Rome in the early Middle Ages. Two marble pulpits are incorporated into the schola, and a Paschal candlestick with Cosmatesque inlay is off to the right. Just beyond the schola is the alter, consisting of an oversized ancient bathtub of granite marble with carrying rings carved into the sides, perhaps once in a mansion or palace—you can muse upon the Romans who once bathed in it. The Gothic-style baldacchino over the alter dates from the thirteen century and is supported by four ancient granite columns from Egypt. Behind the alter is the twelfth-century bishop’s chair ornamented with a porphyry disc, again cut from some ancient column. The apse above the alter has a badly faded fresco of the Madonna and Child with various saints, and although it appears to be many centuries old, it was painted in the nineteenth century in quasi-Medieval style. However, the even more faded fresco on the triumphal arch depicting saints may date from the tenth century.

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At the end of the left aisle, just outside the schola, is the crypt of Hadrian, the pope who rebuilt the church in the late eighth century, converting the rudimentary sixth century food distribution center into what is largely the church we see today. For a small donation, you can descend into the crypt, which is not the usual repository for reputed bones and relics of long-forgotten saints and martyrs—rather, if history and tradition are to be believed, you are entering the remains of a very sacred monument built many centuries before the birth of Christ, when Rome was just another town in Latium and not the center of a great empire. At the foot of the small stairs into the crypt is a tiny chapel, a mini-basilica, with three small columns on each side, their bases inelegantly buried into the pavement, with simple capitals carved with acanthus leaves. On both sides of the chamber are wall niches which may, or may not have once contained relics—oddly, there are no records indicating that the crypt was dedicated to or contained relics of any saint. At the far side of the chapel are large tufa blocks, which was the rough porous rock the early Romans used for their temples, tombs, and defensive walls, later to be supplanted by finer travertine or marble which, unlike tufa, could be polished smoothly, leaving tufa for use in buried foundations. Because ancient inscriptions by priests of Hercules were reportedly found behind the church, these tufa blocks may very well have been part of the large open-air Ara Maxima—the Great Altar--of Hercules Victor, originally built in the fifth century B.C., if not earlier, and whose circular temple stands directly across the street from the church. As noted above, some archeologists now claim that the architectural skeleton of Santa Maria in Cosmedin wasn’t the statio annonae, but rather was a shrine to Hercules built next to the Ara Maxima to house his life-size statue, a magnificent second-century B.C. gilded bronze which was dug up in the fifteenth century in the area of the former Forum Boarium and today is in the Capitoline Museum—graceful and imposing, its gilding still intact, it is a priceless relic from Rome’s past.

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The cult of Hercules was one of the earliest and most powerful in Rome and was inextricably linked with the Forum Boarium. He was the favorite god of several emperors—in the Capitoline Museums there is a striking life-size marble sculpture of Commodus (161-192) decked out in lion skin, a reference to one of the famous tasks Hercules had to complete. The early third century emperor Caracalla was also a devotee, and he adorned his massive baths with many sculptures of his hero-god. It is interesting to speculate that the ancient building Santa Maria in Cosmedin was built into was not the statio annonae but rather was a magnificent shrine built by Caracalla to house the equally magnificent bronze statue of Hercules—indeed the exceptionally fine quality of the remaining fluted columns with Corinthian capitals comprising the framework of the church could easily have come from that period.  

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Before leaving, sit again in the back of the church and try to conjure up the legions of believers who once trod on the faded and chipped floor in front of you, many of them fearful and fretting, weighed down by illness, grief, and pain. Certainly, people caught up in the Black Death of the fourteenth century sought solace here, and prayers for deliverance from the innumerable wars and invasions afflicting Rome through the centuries were also sent up in the silence of the sanctuary. Perhaps your own suffering and pain can be assuaged, however briefly and partially, by contemplating the procession of fellow sojourners who came before you, trying to make sense of this weary thing called life.

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As you leave the church, note the two large columns on both sides of the inner wall of the exit, both part of the ancient building and identical to the other gargantuan columns visible in the nave of the church. These two columns support the campanile, or bell tower, which was built during the twelfth century restoration. In fact, this entranceway next to the sacristy gift shop is the ground level of the tower, which from a distance can be seen to be tilting slightly off center, a problem which engineers in the twenty-second or twenty-third centuries should be able to address. Inside the gift shop to your left, right in the middle of it, is another of the original columns which has been truncated, and on the far wall of the shop is a framed fragment of a precious mosaic from the old St. Peter’s Basilica, the original church built by Constantine the Great in the fourth century, which because of its deterioration over the ensuing eleven centuries was replaced by the present basilica. The mosaic, which depicts the Adoration of the Magi (there is only one wise man, with an angel and probably Joseph behind Mary), once decorated the chapel of the Virgin at the old St. Peter’s and dates from the early eighth century. Its style is not as fluid and elegant as Christian mosaics from the fourth through sixth centuries, but the beautiful contrast between the gold background and the imperial purple of Mary’s robe, as well as the jeweled Byzantine throne she is seated on, indicate a devotion to detail and color. The chapels of old St. Peter’s were resplendent with such mosaics, and it is unfortunate that no others have survived. How the mosaic ended up in the sacristy is one of the many mysteries of Rome. 

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Like many Medieval churches in Rome, Santa Maria in Cosmedin is a cocktail of styles: the ancient, the Medieval, the Renaissance, and the Baroque. The twentieth century restoration that intended to return it to its pristine Medieval state has been decried by some art historians who believe that its current state is but a shadow of what it looked like during the Middle Ages. But of course, as with almost everything else in Rome, no one really knows. What is certain is the constancy and durability of its ancient skeleton which has held the church together for over a thousand years. And if the church was built over one of the most sacred alters of ancient Rome--and it probably was--this space has been a place of worship for over two thousand years, making it the oldest site of continuous worship in Rome.