Well, I have a few things to post here that I learned today, but yeah. And I think I've established myself as the crazy Gaga fan in the group, which I know will make my friends back in the US extremely happy.
BIKE THIS WAY.
Anyway, moving on. Today, we went to the Calisto Catacombs, which is one of a group of three catacombs in Rome. Again, we couldn't take pictures inside in favor of preserving the art left in the catacombs, but I have lots of information and some cute little pictures that will suffice, I think.
So, the church wasn't official until Constantine made if official in about 313 CE, so before that, it operated kind of under the radar and ran on donations. The catacombs today lay on the first land given to the Christians and were dug out of the underlying lime rock, which was solid but relatively easy to dig through; in other words, it was the best of both words. The word catacomb literally means "placed near the cave," and it wasn't until later on that it came to mean a cemetary. The catacomb we visited today was 25 meters deep and extended 20 km underground. The whole thing was built by Christian fossers, or Christian architects and engineers of the 1st-8th century.
There were three different kinds of tombs: the loculo was a singular rectangular tomb, the archosolium was a single family tomb, and the cubicula was a cube-shaped room (hence the name) used for all the loculi of one family. Lots of families could be buried together in a cubicula too. I looked up a little extra information on Wikipedia (don't hurt me!) and found that the underground passages are called ambulacra. The cryptae were passages decorated with the art or the frescoes (those are the little cave-art-type paintings in the catacombs). Graves dug in the floor of the catacombs were called formae, and they were less common. You could either buy your grave or have the church pay for it (and you kind of paid for this by making the church donations and such).
There are a lot of martyrs and popes buried in the catacombs, including the original catacomb of St. Cecilia. Her body was since removed and put in the crypt at her own church (which I saw earlier on this trip), but her original one was in the catacombs with an American-donated statue of the position she was originally found in. The same statue was underneath the altar of her church.
The catacombs were used until the 8th century, when all the bones (remember, there were just bones left, because the bodies would be wrapped in linen, sprinkled with quick lime, and sealed inside the catacombe with quick lime that stuck a marble or stone tablet with an inscription to the opening) were moved to one place in the city. Since the famous martyrs and popes weren't there anymore, people didn't have a reason to be there, and the catacombs were forgotten and rediscovered in 1852.
We saw a lot of familiar frescoes in the catacombs, including banquets (an idea of the afterlife popular in the Gospel of Luke, particularly), Jonah and the Whale, the Good Shepherd, the anchor, and the cross. We discussed a common picture of Jesus with a wand getting Lazarus out of the tomb, a sign of Christians integrating magic and things they knew from their pagan contemporaries into their religion.
After that, we had class and talked about Dante. Then, some of us went to St. John of Laterine before coming back to campus. Pictures from that are going to be posted tomorrow on account of Gaga. I'll also post the Faberge egg pictures and include some tidbits from class. But until then, I'm on the edge of glory. Peace. :)
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