A place of quiet in Rome

Santa Sabina from the Garden of Oranges.

A dozen years ago over lunch I informed my friend, a retired professor fifteen years older than I, that I was headed to Rome. He reached across the small table, put a firm hand on my shoulder and intoned, “You must go to Santa Sabina.”

This was a man, an Englishman, who knew his way around what Oscar Wilde called “the one city of the soul.” As a graduate student, he studied in Rome. As an internationally respected professor of landscape architecture, he taught in Rome. He was, and is, one of those Renaissance men of a certain era — born in 1936 — who could stand on any one of Rome’s seven hills, gaze down on the multi-layered city, and wax on about what lay beneath each church dome, from the ceiling mosaics to the floor tiles.

I had been to Rome, but I had not visited Santa Sabina.

So, on a warm September afternoon, I walked thirty minutes from the old part of the city center to Basilica Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill. It felt like I had walked out of Rome. The Aventine is its own world, a leafy, upper-end neighborhood, charming and charmed. Quiet as old money.

From the outside, Santa Sabina, constructed in 422-432, evokes the image of a ship. A long, flesh-colored ship of unrendered brick built for storms. It stands on the Aventine’s western slope, above the gray-green waters of the south-flowing Tiber. The nave is 153 feet long, almost twice as long as it is wide. There is no transept to vitiate the longitudinal effect, only two Baroque side-chapels installed much later. Nave, of course, is from the Latin word for ship — navis, an early symbol for the Church.

“The holiness of the heart’s affections,” is a much-repeated phrase from Keats, who is buried a fifteen-minute walk away. Such holiness, I suspect, is compounded of equal parts clarity and mystery. Those things that matter most to us are not always explainable to ourselves, let alone to others. It’s the old conundrum of the proverbial eyeball trying to see itself.

Out of the Eternal City’s nine hundred-plus churches, Santa Sabina is my north star in Rome’s crowded constellation of churches. I’m not completely sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m introverted, with an introvert’s inner, shock-proof compass always ready to settle on quiet, out-of-the-way places.

When I stepped into Santa Sabina’s empty, afternoon gloaming and looked down the long, undecorated nave to the altar, I felt an odd sense of déjà vu. Or, something akin to T.S. Eliot’s words in “Little Gidding”:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I was immersed in the immediacy, and present tense, of simplicity and silence, and a sense of monochromatic lightness, not architectural weight, accompanied by the changing play of sunlight and shadow via the arched, clerestory windows. There was no commanding focal point, or glittering mosaics or baroque, algorithmic swirls to tug at the eye — only space and emptiness and muted colors, available to whomever stepped through the door and across the centuries. Here was a space that felt closer to the unsayable source of things, where prayer begins. “Silence is as deep as eternity, speech as shallow as time,” Thomas Carlyle wrote.

The Basilica of Santa Sabina bridges the transition from the covered, public, multi-use Roman basilicas, or forums, to the churches of early Christendom. Santa Sabina also provides us with a view of what Old St. Peter’s Basilica looked like, which was completed almost a century earlier on a much larger scale. Santa Sabin’s architectural style is often termed Romanesque, but it’s not. The Romanesque emerged towards the 11th century. Santa Sabina is Roman.

Sabina, a widow of means, was beheaded in the early second century, after being converted to Christianity by her Syrian slave Serapia, who suffered the same fate. Martyrs to their faith, both were sainted. The church was built on Roman foundations, possibly Sabina’s house, which explains the church’s skewed axis — the apse is positioned in the northeast instead of the traditional east.

One of the side-aisle windows beneath the clerestory windows. The windows of Santa Sabina are made of crystalized gypsum — selenite, not glass — which glows with light even on dark days.

Peter of Illyria, a Dalmatian priest, is credited with the building of the church. A nearby temple of Juno supplied the matched Corinthian columns along the nave — two rows, twelve each, creating narrower side-aisles. That sort of smart repurposing went on all over city-in-transition as the early Christian churches rose from the ruins of the fallen Empire, sacked by the Visigoths in 410. Through the centuries and into the 1930s the basilica has undergone numerous changes; the Santa Sabina we enter today bears the contemplative candor of the early Christian churches.

This is the mother church for the Dominican Order where, according to tradition, St. Dominic welcomed St. Francis to his cell in 1216 in the adjacent monastery, now a chapel. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, dined here.

The Aventine’s most famous attraction brings tourists to the nearby Piazza Dei Cavalieri di Malta, where they line up to look through the keyhole of an unassuming green door. The property is owned by the Priory of the Knights of Malta. The keyhole view sites down a garden path framing the distant dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, bringing it up close in a semi-surreal, somewhat magical way.

On the north side of Santa Sabina is the Garden of Oranges, a public park and shady oasis with a popular city overlook. The historic Basilica of Saints Boniface and Alexius stands on Santa Sabina’s south side.

It’s hard to know how many visit Santa Sabina for its contemplative quiet, or simply wander in because they happened to be in the neighborhood for the keyhole and Garden of Oranges. Others, no doubt, seek certain features associated with Santa Sabina popularized on the Internet.

One is the devil’s stone, which rests on a short pedestal just inside the basilica. It’s black, polished, and shaped like a curling stone, or flattened bowling ball, and likely served as a weight for an ancient Roman scale. Legend, however, says this is the stone the devil tossed at St, Dominic while he was praying at the very spot, an act which did nothing to shake the future saint’s faith. The “claw” marks on the stone are said to be the devil’s own.

The door in the narthex, dating to the fifth century, is the best-known draw. The dark door of cypress once had twenty-eight panels. The eighteen panels remaining, except one, depict Biblical scenes, a sort of illustrated Catechism for early worshippers. The upper left panel evokes one of the earliest surviving representations of Christ’s crucifixion some four centuries earlier. Flanked by the two thieves, Christ stands with his hands held out and upward, in the orant position.

Across from the door, a hole in the wall reveals a secret cloister and an orange tree, often associated with the original tree planted by St. Dominic, who brought the seed from his native Spain.

Inside the basilica, few will notice that the northeastern wall doesn’t run true: it’s about three feet off plumb. When they built up from the Roman foundation, the pragmatic workers incorporated a wall from a Roman house. Close enough.

Yet these things — the orange tree, the devil’s stone, the out-of-plumb eastern wall, even the famous cypress door — are sidebar items. They are not why I return to Santa Sabina when I visit Rome every few years.

A blunt contrast helps explain why.

The Pantheon in the old center of Rome is a tourist magnet. Since 609 it has been a Catholic church, inoculating the former Imperial temple, dedicated in 126, against the building-block plundering that so many ancient Roman structures suffered through the centuries, including the Coliseum.

The Devil’s Stone just inside the basilica door on the spot where St. Dominic is said to have prayed when he encountered Satan.

The Pantheon is also one of earth’s architectural wonders; arced above the rotunda is the largest, unreinforced concrete dome in the world, with its oculus open to the vicissitudes of the Roman sky, including, occasionally, snowflakes drifting down to the marble floor. To stand inside the Pantheon is to experience a human construct that feels extraterrestrial. We’re reminded that all of Rome was once a fantastical Xanadu. Each time I return to the Pantheon I look up and around and gape in awe with all the other tourists.

The Romans were, after all, builders. The Pantheon is spectacular.

And inhuman.

Despite its Christianization, a strong whiff of ancient Rome resides here: “the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,” the command to render unto Caesar; the cynicism of bread and circuses and performative mercy — thumbs up or down?

No building in Rome better conveys the ancient Roman “way.”

To walk from the Pantheon to Santa Sabina, joining the Tiber half way and then up the north face of the Aventine through the famous rose garden, brings all of this home. Santa Sabina is a sanctuary for our deepest longings, a place where one feels received, not overpowered.

On my most recent trip to Rome in March 2023, I stepped into the basilica just as a late-afternoon shaft of sunlight poured through a clerestory window to bisect the nave, numinous as a sunbeam through old-growth cedars. And the words of Lady Julian of Norwich rose inside me: “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” I knew the words deep-down, but they came to me unbidden, each word as fresh as a blueberry in a soft rain. A soft rain that dissolved all antinomies.

Two days later, I remarked to the Dominican priest who was graciously showing me around the basilica: “I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand the mysterious ways I am so drawn to this place.”

He looked towards the natural light sifting through the high windows. After a pause, he smiled and said: “I pray better here. I can concentrate.

Photos by Sydni Sterling