Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme

Santa Croce in Gerusalemme is Rome's own piece of the Holy City. Helena and Constantine raised the first church inside the Sessorian palace to keep the Passion relics venerated there ever since, among them the Titulus Crucis tablet, behind a facade the municipality ranks among the masterpieces of Roman barocchetto.

Why it matters

Of all the places that carry Jerusalem's memory inside Rome, this one claims the most direct physical link: the basilica's own history records that Passion relics found on Calvary were kept here from the fourth century, in a chapel tradition says Helena furnished with soil brought from the holy ground, which is why medieval pilgrims came to treat the church as a fragment of Jerusalem transplanted to the Esquilino. It stands at the head of one of the Seven Churches pilgrimage routes, inside the walls of an imperial residence, and its treasures include one of the most debated inscriptions of early Christianity, displayed here long before modern scholarship began testing it.

What to notice

Approach across the elliptical forecourt of 1743 and read the late-baroque facade, pushed forward by the architects Pietro Passalacqua and Domenico Gregorini for Pope Benedict XIV, a former titular cardinal of this very basilica. Inside, twelve granite columns of the older church divide the naves, four of them absorbed into piers during the eighteenth-century rebuilding. On the apse semidome are paintings attributed to Antoniazzo Romano, and at its centre sits the tomb of Cardinal Quiñones sculpted by Jacopo Sansovino. The Chapel of Saint Helena, sunk below the apse, keeps a sixteenth-century mosaic remaking an earlier one from the age of Valentinian III, credited to Melozzo da Forli or Baldassarre Peruzzi, and a statue of Helena that began as a Roman figure found at Ostia, reworked with a new head and a cross. The Relics Chapel, reached along a corridor conceived as an ascent to Calvary, holds the Passion relics in reliquaries of the nineteenth century: fragments of the True Cross and one of the nails, pieces of the Nativity grotto and the Holy Sepulchre, the finger bone of Saint Thomas, two thorns, and the Titulus Crucis, the condemnation tablet inscribed right to left in Hebrew, Greek and Latin letters with "I. NAZARINVS RE[X IVDAEORVM", probably brought to the basilica in the sixth century and found in the fifteenth walled into the apse arch. Note as well the full-size copy of the Shroud of Turin donated in 2003 and the tomb at the chapel's foot of Antonietta Meo, the child known as Nennolina, moved here in 1999.

Context and history

The Sessorian complex, with its palace, the Elenian baths, the Circus Varianus and the Castrense Amphitheatre later swallowed by the Aurelian Walls, was Helena's Roman residence; around 320, by will of Constantine and his mother, a hall of the palace became a church, first called Basilica Eleniana or Sessoriana. Restorations under Gregory II and Adrian I in the eighth century preceded the radical Romanesque restructuring of Pope Lucius II in 1144, which gave the three naves and the brick bell tower that survive. The monastery beside the basilica dates to the tenth century, attested by the funerary epitaph of Benedict VII, and passed in 1049 to the Benedictines of Montecassino before later communities took over; the Cistercians serve it today, and in 2004 the monastic garden was recreated in the Castrense area with a gate designed by the artist Jannis Kounellis. Benedict XIV's eighteenth-century campaign, and the parish established by Pius X in 1910, complete the institutional story; the basilica museum, created in 1999 within the convent, reopened after restoration and is entered through the sacristy.