February 20: Art & Architecture Class Visits San Clemente

On the afternoon of Wednesday 20 February, UD Art & Architecture students headed to Rome for an exercise in time travel. Their destination was the church of San Clemente and the excavations that lay beneath it. Their goal? To come to an understanding of Rome's growth and development over time.

Students began their exploration by entering the present-day basilica of San Clemente (see above), a church built in the early 12th century and dedicated to the 4th Pope, Saint Clement. Embellished with a beautiful 12th-century mosaic and a lovely Early Renaissance Chapel, the church is home to Rome's Irish Dominicans, who care for this extraordinary historic site.

Once inside the 12th century church, the UD group headed downstairs, into the underlying excavations, finding themselves in a 4th-century basilica constructed shortly after the legalization of Christianity in Rome. That 4th-century church had been used for some 800 years before it was destroyed in the Norman Sack of Rome and replaced with the 12th-century basilica above it.

Still eager to see more and to travel even further back in time, another staircase led students downward into the 1st century AD, where they examined an ancient house - the site of a shrine to the eastern god Mithras (see below) - and a warehouse built after the Great Fire of 64 AD.

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