The Churches of Monti, and Why to Go In

The thing that took me longest to understand about Rome is that the art is not mostly in the museums. It is in the churches, it is largely free, and a great deal of it is standing in buildings that visitors walk past because there is no queue outside and therefore no signal that anything is happening.

Monti has four of these within a few minutes of one another. Between them they hold the oldest apse mosaic in the city, the finest Byzantine mosaic chapel in Rome, a Michelangelo, and a fresco cycle painted in the 1640s. You can see all of it in a morning, and you will pay almost nothing.

Santa Prassede: the room I take everybody to

Via di Santa Prassede 9a, roughly five minutes uphill.

From the street it is nothing. A plain door, a plain wall, easy to walk past twice, which I did.

Inside, on the right-hand side, is the Chapel of San Zeno, built in the ninth century by Pope Paschal I as a resting place for his mother Theodora, and covered from floor to vault in gold mosaic. The Romans of the Middle Ages called it the Garden of Paradise. It is the most important piece of Byzantine mosaic work still standing in Rome, and it is roughly the size of a small room, which means you are not looking up at it from forty metres away. You are inside it.

Two practical things. Entry is free, but the chapel is dark and there is a light box: take one-euro coins, because standing in front of that gold with no light is a small tragedy. And the church closes in the middle of the day, opening in the morning until around noon and again in the late afternoon.

Go late in the afternoon if you can. The gold takes the light differently then and I have never got tired of it.

Santa Pudenziana: the oldest apse mosaic in Rome

Via Urbana 160, three or four minutes up our own street.

This one sits noticeably below the modern pavement, which tells you immediately how much Rome has risen. The church was built into a second-century bath house in the fourth century, which is about as early as churches in this city get.

In the apse is a mosaic of Christ enthroned among the apostles, dated to around 390, restored in the sixteenth century, and generally held to be the oldest surviving apse mosaic in Rome. A nineteenth-century German historian called it the most beautiful mosaic in the city, and while I would not want to arbitrate that, I would say this: it is early enough that the figures still look Roman rather than Byzantine, seated in togas, and you can watch one world becoming another.

I pass this door most days. It never stops being remarkable that it is simply there, on the way to the supermarket.

San Pietro in Vincoli: Michelangelo, and no queue

Four to six minutes, up the covered Salita dei Borgia off Via Cavour.

Michelangelo’s Moses is here, carved for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and it is free to walk in and look at. On any given morning half of Rome is standing in a line somewhere else while this room is quiet.

The approach is part of the pleasure. The Salita dei Borgia is a covered stone staircase climbing off Via Cavour, and coming up out of it into the little piazza in front of the church is one of the small dramatic moments of the neighbourhood.

The chains that give the church its name, said to be those that bound Peter, are kept under the high altar. Bring a coin for the light here too.

San Martino ai Monti: the one for a rainy afternoon

A few minutes uphill, near Santa Maria Maggiore.

Less visited than the others and worth the walk. Its ancient claim runs back to an early Christian titulus, and there is a substantial early structure beneath the church. Above ground, the nave carries a fresco cycle painted between 1647 and 1651 by Gaspard Dughet and Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, full of the Roman countryside as painters saw it in the seventeenth century.

It is a landscape painter’s church, which is an odd and lovely thing to find in the middle of a city.

And, at the top of the hill, Santa Maria Maggiore

Four or five minutes uphill and on a different scale entirely: one of the four papal basilicas, with fifth-century mosaics running along the nave that most people never look up at because the ceiling is doing something louder.

Go for the nave mosaics. Stand in the middle, look left and right rather than forward, and take your time.

How to visit without ruining it

Cover your shoulders and knees. It is enforced, and being turned away after a long walk is a bad twenty minutes. A scarf in a bag solves it for everybody.

Respect the closing hours. Roman churches largely shut in the middle of the day. Mornings until around noon and late afternoons are your windows.

Carry coins. Almost every good thing in a Roman church is behind a light box, and the difference a euro makes is not small.

Do not go into all of them in one day. Two is a morning. Four is a slog, and you will stop seeing anything by the third.

They are working churches. If a mass is being said, go quietly to the back, or come again later.

All four of these are within a few minutes of our front door on Via Urbana, and the walking times are in my guide to Monti along with everything else in the rione.