dedicated to that saint; and it lives, as a distinct and separate
place, in my recollection, too. It is very small and low-roofed;
and the dread and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are
on it, as if they had come up in a dark mist through the floor.
Hanging on the walls, among the clustered votive offerings, are
objects, at once strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance,
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
with the place – rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers
instruments of violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use,
and hung up to propitiate offended Heaven: as if the blood upon
them would drain off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry
with. It is all so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the
dungeons below are so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked;
that this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream: and in
the vision of great churches which come rolling past me like a sea,
it is a small wave by itself, that melts into no other wave, and
does not flow on with the rest.
It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are
entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the city. Many
churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which,
in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples,
and what not: but I do not speak of them. Beneath the church of
St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a terrific range
of caverns, hewn out of the rock, and said to have another outlet
underneath the Coliseum – tremendous darknesses of vast extent,
half-buried in the earth and unexplorable, where the dull torches,
flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long ranges of distant
vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in a city of
the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls, dripdrop,
drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and
there, and never saw, or never will see, one ray of the sun. Some
accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the
amphitheatre; some the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some,
both. But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the
upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early
Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the
wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the
night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon
and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these,
their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!
Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of
San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs
of Rome – quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hidingplaces
of the Christians. These ghastly passages have been
explored for twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty
miles in circumference.
A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only
guide, down into this profound and dreadful place. The narrow ways
and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy
air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track
by which we had come: and I could not help thinking ‘Good Heaven,
if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or
if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!’ On we
wandered, among martyrs’ graves: passing great subterranean
vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with
heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge
there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that which
lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; Graves of
men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
persecutors, ‘We are Christians! We are Christians!’ that they
might be murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm of
martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and little
niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs’ blood; Graves of some