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Embark on a journey to the imperial and early Christian Rome by uncovering layers and millenniums of history as you descend into the Eternal city’s underground burial chambers, its long winding catacombs and its crypts. You’ll never believe what lies beneath Rome until you see it for yourself on the original Crypts and Catacombs of Rome Tour. Go below and beyond to a time when Christianity was considered a cult, whose members were executed as heretics and buried as martyrs, as your guide leads you through the catacombs of Rome. These long corridors house hundreds of burial chambers, from modest singles to extravagant family tombs. Basilica San Clemente is an unexpected surprise, as we journey from the top layer – a 14thcentury Basilica –down through a huge 4thcentury Basilica, a 2ndcentury sanctuary believed to have once hosted rituals by the mysterious Mithraic cult and finally, an incredibly preserved 1stcentury Roman street, replete with herring bone tiling. The biggest surprise of this tour, however, and the one that will stay in your mind long after you have returned home, is the Capuchin Crypt. The recent addition of an official museum here means that our visitis preluded by an encounter with Caravaggio’s magnificent canvas ‘St. Francis in Meditation’ and relics from the life of St. Francis himself and some of his followers. But the real star of the show is the crypt itself, decorated in the bones of 4,000 Capuchin monks. Witness a real skull and cross bones, chandeliers made of vertebrae and the chilling words ‘What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you will be’. According to the monks this is a message of hope. We’ll let you be the judge of that.
