Spend a full day in central Rome discovering the city’s best underground basilicas and hidden Christian sites.
Your experience will start in the morning, in the course of which you’ll walk three times underground between ruins and columns, you’ll enter a 2000 years old market and explore the Isola Tiberina by crossing the oldest bridge in Rome.
You’ll enter San Nicola in Carcere, a church built over ancient places of worship, and the underground house of Santa Cecilia, where you’ll admire beautiful ancient mosaics, cryptic inscriptions and a richly decorated crypt. Your morning tour will end with a visit to the church of San Crisogono built over a huge underground house, where archaeologists found a fascinating frescoed wall.
After taking a short break to have lunch in a typical Italian restaurant, your experience will continue; in the afternoon you’ll discover hidden underground treasures in some of the most sensational churches in Rome. You’ll start with a visit to the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, the oldest of the four Papal Basilicas and considered the mother of all churches in the city, and to the Basilica of San Clemente, the only church in Rome to be built on three different levels, all of which can be explored. You’ll then move on to the Basilica dei Quattro Santi Incoronati, dedicated to four anonymous saints and martyrs and where you can see some extraordinary frescoes with scenes of the Zodiac, the Four Seasons, the Liberal Arts and King Solomon. Your tour will then end in San Pietro in Vincoli, well renowned for the famous statue of Moses that Michelangelo created for the tomb of Pope Giulio II.