Italy Impressions 4: San Clemente Underground

Each step was cooler than the one before. By the time we emerged into another dimly lit basilica, or echo of it, I felt nearly human, responsive to everything. Here below were the bones of things...

Kelly Cogswell

Aug 11, 2022

Hello from Paris!

This week—the continuation of my piece on San Clemente al Laterano!

San Clemente Part 2: Underground

(San Clemente Part 1)

Sometimes, I confuse Persephone with the snake-bit Eurydice whose husband Orpheus ventures into hell to retrieve his beloved dead wife, and when they’ve almost escaped, can practically smell the spring air, does the one and only thing he is forbidden to do—looks back. Trapping Eurydice underground to rule forever over the dead.

Persephone, though, comes and goes from the place, commutes. Actually alive when Hades abducted her, she got hungry and ate half a dozen pomegranate seeds there. Because of that, her mother Demeter’s efforts only gave her a partial reprieve, and she’s forced to return to Hades six months a year, the dark period of winter ending as she emerges blinking at the sun. Though some versions of the myth have her, too, not just as a goddess of fertility and plants, but what Homer called “the dread Persephone,” another queen of the dead, so greedy for blood sacrifice Odysseus pauses to give her plenty.

So much for a consensus on looking back. For Orpheus it was disastrous. For Persephone— inevitable. In fact much the same as looking forward when night is on either side of day, which lengthens, then shrinks then gets longer again. Plants sleep, or die, and are reborn. Then die again. History, too, moves in cycles. Governments rise and fall. Nothing is eternal but time. And maybe even that has an end, and a beginning.

In San Clemente, within spitting distance of the Colisseum, we risk it. Looking back. Enter the world that used to be. That still is. There are obstacles. At the ticket booth, a sign declares that you have to buy tickets twenty-four hours in advance—which we hadn’t. A woman cranky with repeating herself to tourists refused our cash and debit cards, gestured to the QR code pasted against the plexiglass.

I was almost weepy with exhaustion and the heat. But decided to buy tickets for the next day, went online, and miraculously noticed a couple of upcoming slots just fifteen minutes away. I typed my credit card info as fast as I could with sweaty, swollen fingers, then we returned to the booth with our electronic tickets. She waved us in, and we began the descent.

Each step was cooler than the one before. By the time we emerged into another dimly lit basilica, or echo of it, I felt nearly human, responsive to everything. Here below were the bones of things, the naked arches, minimalist walls, what’s left when they are stripped of their gilding, though touches of decoration remained. Like the fresco to the right painted in the rich reds and creams and greens familiar from photos of Pompeii.

I confess, I saw a huge walrus before I realized that the “tusks” were curtains.

In it, fish swim in the air near humans staring in amazement at a tomb. It belongs to San Clemente, martyr and defender of the faith. His enemies tried to silence him several times, and finally tied him to an anchor and tossed him into the sea, where his remains were preserved by this extraordinary tomb which once a year would rise from the waters, and you could worship the saint and beg for miracles. I wonder for a minute what he did the rest of the year, stuck in the lightless ocean depths.

We wander the aisles. There are other frescoes. Even the cement walls are interesting, sometimes embedded with older fragments that I imagine shored up the foundation for the building above. This whole space was filled in with rubble to support it. Most of it forgotten until the 1860’s when a curious monk began the herculean task of excavating it. I don’t think about that, though. I enjoy the coolness. The flash of color on the frescoes, the ruins which aren’t ruined, but have become something unto themselves.

Despite the other tourists, and complaining children, the space feels quiet, muted. As if the stones are indifferent to their chatter. My spine uncurls languidly for the first time in weeks. The light is dim. There are arrows telling us where to go next, but they contradict themselves or we don’t understand their logic. They make it an adventure. We find the main altar in the center nave. There’s another fresco behind it. This one has a kind of cartoon depicting one of San Clemente’s escapes and a dirty word—the first written in vernacular Latin—uttered by the boss of those who lost him.

“Fili de puta, traite!”, “Sons of whores, keep pulling!” From Live Virtual Tour.

Not far beyond that in another room is an altar to San Cirillo, the missionary who found San Clemente’s bones (and an anchor) in Crimea, and brought them back to Rome. And whose attempt to create a script to communicate in the slavic language eventually became the Cyrillic alphabet.

We spend a long time looking at everything before we descend again, this time on narrow twisting stairs. The air is even cooler. The structures are older, dating as far back as the 1st century AD. It is darker, more maze-like than above, though we don’t find a Minotaur. Just a hallway which used to be an alley, naked to the sky. Now it smells of minerals and damp rock. Several buildings open onto it, including a Christian chapel, and a warehouse which may have been a mint, as well as the home of a wealthy family which one source I would read later says burned in the same fire that Nero was rumored to have serenaded.

Around 200 AD the central room of the house was converted into a Mithraeum – a temple dedicated to the god Mithras. I remember entering, and looking at the altar, but maybe that was another one. In a video there’s a grill separating us from the room which has wide ledges to either side. They served as benches for worshippers. The arched ceiling and walls are rough, like they formed naturally in a cave—what the adepts called these places. In the center is a large rectangular block with carvings on the side. That’s the altar to Mithra, or a cast of it. Even from outside the room, you can see a man planting his dagger in a bull. (You can find more details in this article.)

I can stare as long as I like. The other tourists have disappeared, even the groups behind us have already hurried past. We linger for the coolness, the pleasures of dim light on a broiling July day, the mystery of time.

We hear water running, and traipse toward it. A step up, a step down. Edging between crumbing walls. Turning and turning again. I figure we can’t get lost, not really, but remember the story of Tom Sawyer losing his way in some Missouri cave. The trickle gets louder and louder. Finally, across one last dark room there’s a square of glass in the floor, and below it a stream, the Labican. It glows from a spotlight, which besides illuminating the stream has also nurtured a growing expanse of algae glowing so bright green the whole thing seems bizarre, and miraculous. Alien. Life really does find a way.

So, sue me. I took this too quickly and practically in the dark.

The discovery caps my delight. We wind our way towards the exit, another set of stairs, and are rewarded with another square, another glimpse of the stream and bright green algae growing under the lamp. I imagine the water bringing it there, and how, perceiving the light, it latched on tight.

Back in the sunlight, in the courtyard of the cloister, we pause again on a bench before heading off to the toilets. I’m so happy, so full. What a perfect day with so much beauty in it. I think of David, who brought us there with his list. Who’d been with us in spirit all day charging down the sidewalks. Leaving us in the dust. I reach for my phone to call him, but remember with a sudden lurching grief that he’s dead. And I feel such loss. All my joy, and all my pleasure suddenly strangled. How dare these stones remain, but not David, not him.

Eurydice, BY H.D.

was on my mind as I wrote this, full of grief and defiance, and the why, why, why of the second stanza. And the last stanza is one the best in the language.

(Click here to read the poem in its entirety.)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                               II

...

why did you glance back?
why did you hesitate for that moment?
why did you bend your face
caught with the flame of the upper earth,
above my face?

what was it that crossed my face
with the light from yours
and your glance?
what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,
the fire of your own presence?

What had my face to offer
but reflex of the earth,
hyacinth colour
caught from the raw fissure in the rock
where the light struck,
and the colour of azure crocuses
and the bright surface of gold crocuses
and of the wind-flower,
swift in its veins as lightning
and as white.

    ...
                               VI

Against the black
I have more fervour
than you in all the splendour of that place,
against the blackness
and the stark grey
I have more light;

and the flowers,
if I should tell you,
you would turn from your own fit paths
toward hell,
turn again and glance back
and I would sink into a place
even more terrible than this.

                              VII

At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

From the Poetry Foundation.