San Paolo fuori le Mura: no vibe, man
San Paolo fuori le Mura is the Lenten stational church for today. There is a fine description with beautiful photos here. San Paolo is the largest church in Rome after St Peter’s. It is vast, majestic, awe-inspiring, magnificent, but in some ways strikes you as rather cold and lifeless and merely grandiose. Painstakingly reconstructed after the disastrous fire of 1823, in a certain sense it’s true that it is “an excellent (perhaps the best) representation of an early Christian basilica because it is devoid of the natural accretions and decorations that collect over many centuries of use”. However, as well as lacking accretions it seems to lack the mysterious “soul” that also accrues with use. For me San Paolo, for all its meticulous beauty, is a sign that you can’t recapture the past just by reconstructing it. Sad to say.
The medieval cloister, however, which escaped the fire largely undamaged, is wonderful: light, airy, delicate, enchanting, an invitation to meditation, one of the jewels of Rome.
Excavations (2002–2006) under the high altar of the basilica recently resulted in the rediscovery of the tomb of St Paul, including a marble sarcophagus, which had been made inaccessible by the 19th-century reconstruction work. Information is still fairly sparse but a brief report in English is here and the official announcement (in Italian) here. There will now be works at the basilica to make the 4th-century tomb structure more visible to pilgrims and visitors, along with a visitors’ centre and (unfortunately but no doubt necessarily) security screening.
2 comments:
The day I visited there was cold and dreary and the mass transit was on strike. The door to the left aisle was left open so wind was pouring in. Brrrrrrrrrr. I did love the cloisters, though -- the twisty columns, the flower garden. The sun chose to shine while we were in the middle of it...a moment of enchantment, as you put it.
Another nice thing about Saint Paul is that they keep the Blessed Sacrament in a nice chapel with a medieval wooden crucifix, a medieval icon of Mary, and a medieval (and beat up) wooden statue of Saint Paul. So often our povero Gesù is placed in such ugly surroundings and with (relatively) ugly companions (at Saint Peter's for example, and, even worsse, Saint John the Lateran). Here, he is in the best company the church can offer, and that has made up, in my visits, for the undoubtedly cold feel of the basilica.
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