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San Paolo fuori le Mura Review

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San Paolo fuori le Mura

Address: Piazzale San Paolo, Via Ostiense 190, Testaccio, Rome | Map It
Phone: 06/5410341

St. Paul's Outside the Walls

Category: Religious Sites
Location: Aventino

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Fodor's Review:

For all the dreariness of its location—and, indeed, for all of its exterior's dullness (19th-century British writer Augustus Hare said the church looked like "a very ugly railway station")—St. Paul's is one of the most historic and important churches in Rome, second in size only to St. Peter's Basilica and one of the city's four pilgrimage churches, along with St. Peter's, San Giovanni in Laterano, and Santa Maria Maggiore. Built in the 4th century AD by Constantine over the site where St. Paul had been buried, St. Paul's was then rebuilt and enlarged. But in July 1823 a fire burned the church to the ground. All that remained, apart from a few mosaics, the sculptured ciborium (tabernacle), and other decorations, were the cloisters. Although the rebuilt St. Paul's has a sort of monumental grandeur, it's only in the cloisters that you get a real sense of what must have been the magnificence of the original building.

Open: Daily 7-6; cloister 9-1 and 3-6
Metro: Pyramide

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