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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
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St. Paul's Outside the Walls
- Category: Religious Sites
- Location: Testaccio
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 considerably enlarged about a century later. At the time it was the largest church in Europe, but its location outside the city walls left it especially vulnerable to attack, and it was sacked by the rampaging Saracens in 846. Although fortified in the 9th century, the church gradually declined in importance, especially as the surrounding marshland became malarial swamps. Sheep wandered through the basilica, undisturbed by the few remaining monks. This sorry state of affairs came to a sudden end in the middle of the 11th century with the arrival of a new abbot, Hildebrandt. He restored the building, recruited new monks, and made St. Paul's a revered center of pilgrimage once more. And so it remained until July 1823, when 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, with its columns stretching up the dusky nave and its 19th-century mosaics glinting dully, 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
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