San Silvestro in Capite

Start in the courtyard. The city noise drops away the moment you pass the gate. Behind you, buses and scooters circle the square. In front of you, the light falls softly on old stone, and the walls hold dozens of carved fragments set into the plaster like pieces of a puzzle. Some carry Latin letters. Some carry crosses, scrolls, or the worn outline of a face. This is San Silvestro in Capite, one of the older churches in the heart of Rome.

Those fragments are a good place to begin. Many of them come from early Christian burial grounds and from earlier versions of this church. Over the centuries, builders and priests did not throw this material away. They kept it and set it into the walls of the atrium. Take a slow walk around the edges. You are reading Rome the way Romans often built it — by reusing what came before, layer on layer.

The story of this site goes back to the eighth century. Pope Paul I founded a church and monastery here, and tradition holds that he built it on the land of his own family home. At that time, Rome was a smaller and more fragile city than the one around you now. Popes were collecting the bones of early martyrs from the catacombs outside the walls. Those burial grounds were exposed to raids, so the relics were brought inside the city for safety, and many came here.

The church carries two saints in its original dedication. One is Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr. The other is Saint Sylvester, a pope of the fourth century. Sylvester led the Church during the reign of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to support Christianity. Over time, Sylvester's name became the one people used. The church grew into a place of pilgrimage because of what it held inside.

And now, the unusual part of the name. "In Capite" means "of the head" in Latin. The church is named for a relic it has kept for centuries — a skull that tradition identifies as the head of Saint John the Baptist. You should know this claim is not unique. Other churches in Europe, including the cathedral of Amiens in France, have also claimed the Baptist's head. So treat it as devotion and tradition, not as settled history. Still, for many generations of pilgrims, this was the reason to come.

The relic is kept in a side chapel to the left as you enter, inside a decorated reliquary. Even if you are not religious, it is worth a quiet look. You will often see someone kneeling there, or lighting a candle nearby. The chapel is small and the light is low. It feels very different from the open, golden space of the main nave.

Here is a second surprise most visitors miss. For centuries, this church also held a famous painted image of the face of Christ, known as the Mandylion of Edessa. Edessa was an ancient city in what is now southeastern Turkey. Legend says the image came from a cloth that Christ pressed to his own face. The painting stayed here for a long time. In the late nineteenth century it was moved to the Vatican, where it is still kept today.

Now look up at the bell tower as you leave or arrive. It is Romanesque, a medieval style built with simple brick and small arched openings in neat rows. Romanesque towers like this once rose above many Roman neighbourhoods. The tower is the oldest part of the church that you can easily see from the street. Notice how plain and solid it looks next to the curved, sculpted façade below it.

That façade, and most of what you see inside, come from much later. The church was largely rebuilt in the Baroque period, between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Baroque is the dramatic style of Rome after the Renaissance — gilding, coloured marble, painted ceilings, and strong contrasts of light and shadow. Statues of saints stand along the top of the front. Inside, the ceiling is covered with painted scenes, and the side chapels glow with marble in red, green, and cream.

For a long period, the monastery next door belonged to an order of nuns called the Poor Clares. They lived here for centuries, behind closed walls, in a life of prayer. After Italy became a unified kingdom in the late nineteenth century, the new state took over many religious buildings in Rome. The convent was one of them. It became the city's central post office, and the large building beside the church still carries that history.

The church itself found a new community. In 1890, it was given to English-speaking Catholics in Rome, and it has served them ever since. Irish priests of the Pallottine order have looked after it for much of that time. So in the middle of this very Roman square, you can often hear Mass said in English. Travellers, students, and English-speaking residents gather here, and notices at the door are usually in English as well as Italian.

Step back out to the square for a moment. Piazza San Silvestro sits just off Via del Corso, one of the main shopping streets of central Rome. The Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps are all within a short walk. This square is a hub for city buses, so it is rarely quiet. Many people pass the church every day without knowing what lies past the gate. That contrast is part of its charm.

Before you go, stand in the courtyard once more. Listen to the difference between the traffic outside and the stillness in here. Look again at the old carved stones in the walls, older than almost everything else around them. Then look up at the brick tower against the sky. As you walk back into the noise of the square, you carry a small piece of the city's long memory with you.