Roman Catacombs site features

From the road it is a gate, a drive and a low building among pines. Nothing about the surface suggests scale: a ticket office, a bookshop, a yard, and a stair going down.

Then the temperature drops and the walls close in. The passages are cut straight down through soft rock, shoulder-width, with a flat floor and a ceiling just above head height, and they run further than the light does.

Both walls are shelves. Rectangular slots are cut one above another from ankle height to the ceiling, in rows, for the whole length of every corridor — empty now, open, and far smaller than you expect. Most of them are the length of a person; a great many are the length of a child.

At intervals the corridor widens into a small square room with slots cut into all four sides and sometimes a painted ceiling — faded reds and ochres, a figure with arms raised, a fish, a basket.

One chamber is different. It is larger, lined with inscription slabs in Greek lettering, and has a simple altar: the Crypt of the Popes.

You are always with other people and a guide, because you are not allowed to be there otherwise, and the group moves together through corridors where two abreast is already a squeeze.

The Crypt of the Popes

Described by the custodians as the heart of these catacombs. Sixteen pontiffs were buried in the complex.

The Crypt of Saint Cecilia

One of the named routes through San Callisto.

The cubicles of the sacraments

Chambers off the corridors, on the published visit route.

The regions

The region known as that of Pope Miltiades and the region of Saint Caius and Saint Eusebius.

The scale

About half a million Christians, including dozens of martyrs, in what was the official cemetery of the Church of Rome in the 3rd century.

Who runs it

Owned by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, governed by the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, shown to visitors by the Salesians of Don Bosco since 1930.