“Broadening the Debate” explores the two-part campaign that was mounted to win over Pope Leo XII in favor of an exact reconstruction of the burned basilica.

“Pius IX and Romantic Aesthetics” presents the understudied history of artistic Catholic Romanticism in Rome between 1830 and 1860, yielding a new picture of Pope Pius IX’s Romantic inclinations in his early art patronage, not just at San Paolo but across Rome.

“Resisting Resurrection” examines the causes and consequences of the bureaucratic paralysis that immobilized the San Paolo worksite following Leo XII’s seemingly straightforward order for an exact reconstruction.

“Material Histories” explores three different aspects of how materials and materiality functioned in giving meaning to the reconstructed San Paolo: Poletti’s reuse of ancient marbles salvaged from the old basilica to decorate his new choir; the unusual materials employed to confer meaning on his new St. Benedict chapel and baldachin; and the fetishized and then informationalized materiality of the consecration ceremony of 1840.

“Money Matters” offers an in-depth archival study of the first eight-year-long global fundraising campaign by which money was raised for the reconstruction of San Paolo between 1825 and 1833.

The Conclusion contrasts the principles that had underpinned the San Paolo reconstruction with those that guided Pius and his advisors after 1850, as they mobilized sacred history through new architectural and planning initiatives in Rome, rethinking the relationship between the international faithful and the institutional church and laying the groundwork for the modern papacy.

“Reframing the Debate” pieces together other elements of the campaign in favor of an exact reconstruction, leading up to a major success in spring 1825: Pope Leo XII’s decision to issue an international call for donations to the reconstruction.

“Prelude to a Revolution” explores the consequences of Gregory XVI’s change of heart following the 1840 consecration of San Paolo, when he abruptly revoked permission for several key features and commanded his architect instead to rebuild the remainder of the church as inexpensively as possible.

“Paul and Peter” describes a series of changes that Pope Gregory XVI and his advisors made in the iconographic and liturgical/spatial aspects of the basilica, arguing that they aimed to recast the relationship of Peter and Paul in the basilica’s historic iconography to highlight their joint protection of Rome and to foreground Paul as the new guide for the Church in its confrontation with secular modernity.

“Disenchanting Histories” describes how the status of Vitruvian classicism and Early Christian architecture changed in Roman intellectual and clerical culture over the several decades prior to c. 1820 in conjunction with a series of increasingly traumatic political events.

“Eighteen Forty-Eight” uses previously unstudied archival sources to describe in vivid detail how the 1848–1849 revolts in Rome played out at the San Paolo construction site and with what consequences.

“Future Visions” sets out the main positions that emerged in the debate that unfolded over what to do about the burned San Paolo after the fire of 1823.

“Catholic Romanticism” places Pope Leo XII’s decision of spring 1825 in the larger cultural context of the often overlooked Catholic Romanticism that enjoyed favor at the Papal court in these years.

Paul of Tarsus – St. Paul the Apostle, the Apostle to the Gentiles, God’s Chosen Vessel – was martyred in Rome sometime between 65 and 67 CE. He was laid to rest along the via Ostiense, south of Rome, in a sepulchral area owned by a Christian woman named Lucina, where his tomb soon attracted great veneration. Not long after Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity in 313, a modest basilica was erected to shelter the tomb, sponsored, probably, by Constantine himself. Within a few decades, local devotion had outgrown this first basilica, so in 384 (or 386) the co-emperors Theodosius I, Valentinian II, and Arcadius launched the construction of a far bigger one. This prodigious new monument was consecrated under Honorius early in the fifth century and came to be known as San Paolo fuori le mura for its location beyond the old Aurelian city walls. It was to endure for more than fourteen centuries as one of the most important churches in Christendom and, with St. Peter’s, one of Rome’s two most important pilgrimage centers2 (Figure 1).