If it was not the Cult of the Saints, what was the nature of Christian activity in late antique Rome? I argue that alterations in the city’s built environment from the fourth to the sixth century were not oriented around the bodies of the saints. Chapter 8 examines changing land use, particularly the rise of major Christian complexes, including, crucially, monasteries and xenodochia.

Much of the evidence for the Cult of the Saints in Rome is based on the idea of ad sanctos burials: people clamoring to be close to the bodies of the saints. I argue in Chapter 7 that there is no connection, necessarily, between ad sanctos and burial patterns late antique Rome. Burial ad sanctos becomes, then, not a measure of the power of the Cult of the Saints in Rome, but an example of a modern tendency to see burial patterns where they did not necessarily exist.

The Catacombs of Callixtus’s Crypt of the Popes bear testimony to the antiquity of Rome’s apostolic past, containing the burials of a succession of popes from the second and third centuries. Upon close examination, however, the site is not as it seems. Far from being an authentic, untouched papal burial site since the third century, I argue in Chapter 5 that the Crypt of the Popes is a (re)constructed mnemotopia for the benefit of a Catholic audience – engineered by the famed Roman “sacred archaeologist” Giovanni Battista De Rossi (1822–1894).

Was the corpse considered polluted or holy in fourth-century Rome? I argue in Chapter 3 that unlike other fourth-century Christians elsewhere, Roman Christians refrained from fetishizing the corpse as a precious object. Only much later, in the wake of the Reformation, did Catholics come to regard the holy corpse with new fascination and ardent devotion. It was during this era that catacomb discovery and renovation began in earnest. This charnel piety redoubled again in the late nineteenth century, once again driving catacomb exploration and excavation, bringing with it a distinctively corporeal valuation of martyrs.

Deep in the Veneto countryside, travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century might easily bypass the Italian town of Monselice, overshadowed as it was by the graceful Renaissance cities of Padua and Ferrara. Fortunately for Monselice, the little hamlet had its own attraction that lured wayfarers who might not otherwise have bothered to scale the heights of the rocky promontory against which Monselice was poiseds if they were hastening between the two great cities which framed it. It was not the town’s sturdy duomo that drew people – any town of consequence had one of these – nor the castello that stubbornly topped the promontory with a crenellated crown; it was something quite unexpected that greeted a pious Christian pilgrim this close to the powerhouse of Venice: a microcosmic, sacred Rome artfully arranged according to a symbolic, secret order.

Chapter 2, “Rewiring the Sacred Circuit (Roma Sancta Renovata),” delves more deeply into the insights of Chapter 1, considering the process of mapping sacred space. I focus on two late antique “case studies” – a list of the burial sites of early Roman Christian martyrs – the so-called Depositio Martyrum from the Calendar of 354 – and the work of the controversial pope Damasus (366–84 CE) in promoting specific saints’ shrines on the urban periphery. In the nineteenth century, the early modern impulse to make maps drove scholars to interpret these materials as determinative of the late antique Christian conquest of space.

Chapter 1 interrogates the concept of sacred space – particularly the sacred space that is associated with the burial of the dead. For whom is it sacred and how did it become so? Drawing on the works of Jerome and Prudentius – both of whom redraw conceptual maps of late fourth-century Rome in their writings – I consider the theoretical approaches to space and place of Jonathan Z. Smith and the environmental psychologist Kenneth Craik. I ask the question: How do we reshape the past through invocations of place and reorientation of space?

What investment did late antique Rome have in Peter, who perhaps did not even set foot in the city? Chapter 4 argues that St. Peter’s and the memoria apostolorum were significant, even “holy” sites in late antiquity because of the apostles’ ethereal presence, not their relics or bodies. It challenges us to consider new models for holy space apart from corporeal presence.

Rome’s Jewish catacombs play a major role in reconstructing the nature and identity of the late antique city’s Jewish population. And yet, a closer and critical examination of these sites reveals that there is much to question about the wisdom and accuracy of reconstructing late antique Roman Judaism based on the catacombs. In Chapter 6, I question whether such a thing as a “Jewish catacomb” ever truly existed in isolation in late antique Rome, and what such a thing might reveal about Jewish-Christian relations in the fourth and fifth centuries.