Basilica di San Saba

On the little Aventine, San Saba began as a monastic settlement of Palestinian monks and grew into one of medieval Rome's leading monasteries. Its Romanesque hall preserves a cosmatesque pavement of five marble discs and thirteenth-century frescoes.

Why it matters

Rome's monastic landscape was built by communities from the east, and San Saba preserves that story better than almost anywhere in the city. The parish history records how monks from the monastery of Saint Sabas in Judea settled here, on ground that had held a Roman-era oratory dedicated to Saint Silvia, mother of Pope Gregory the Great; the site later passed through Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian and regular canonical hands before the Jesuits took charge in 1573. The basilica has the form of an early Christian hall, with three aisles each ending in an apse.

What to notice

A fifteenth-century loggia of granite columns shelters sarcophagi and objects recovered from the surrounding archaeology. Inside, fourteen ancient columns with varied capitals divide the naves; the liturgical-arts literature notes they are spolia of pink and grey Egyptian granite and stone from Greece and Algeria. The cosmatesque floor of 1205 arranges five large discs of different marbles at the centre, and a fragment of the medieval schola cantorum with its cosmatesque inlay survives in a side aisle. On the left opens a fourth aisle, probably the original portico, where thirteenth-century frescoes remain in place. The Annunciation appears over the chancel arch. In the apse, a 1575 fresco of Christ in glory with Saints Andrew and Sabas sits above earlier paintings of the Madonna, apostles and crucifixion from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. A typical medieval bell tower closes the silhouette.

Context and history

Dating is layered. Tradition places the first Palestinian monks here in the mid-seventh century, arrived for a Roman council, while the parish itself dates the settlement to around the eighth century; the municipal record describes the church rising in that period over the oratory of Saint Silvia. Under Greek monks the community prospered until the eleventh century, and after the East-West schism the monastery went to western orders. The Jesuits' German-Hungarian College occupied the complex from 1573; the eighteenth-century suppression of the order brought Franciscans and then Salesians, and the Jesuits returned at the start of the twentieth century to lead the community, by then a parish. A complete thirteenth-century renovation gave the church its medieval character, and an early twentieth-century restoration, guided by a sixteenth-century description of the interior, removed baroque additions; a later mid-twentieth-century campaign simplified the interior again, though the great ciborium over the altar remains.