1 Basilica of San Clemente What lies beneath
ome is a giant palimpsest, with successive strata of history written one on top of the other. There’s a great example of that in just one building on the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano. The Basilica of San Clemente, built from 1108, is a wonderful monument in itself, with fine mosaics and frescoes in a side chapel. But below the 12th-century church there’s another, dating from the fourth century and lie two Roman buildings from the late first century. One was a house possibly used as a – a clandestine early Christian meeting place. The other contained a Mithraeum, a temple to the cult of Mithras, of a kind seen in other parts of the empire, including Britain. (There’s a Mithraeum in the City of London, and another at Carrawburgh Fort on Hadrian’s Wall – the cult was popular with Roman soldiers in that period.) This one boasts a finely carved altar depicting the god Mithras killing a bull, typical of such sites.
