This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
As I discussed in a previous post, “When in Rome…” we did spend quite a bit of time in sacred, mostly Catholic spaces while in Italy, and I am not Catholic. While I didn’t feel religious awe during these visits, I must say I did experience intense artistic, architectural, and often historical awe. Most Americans aren’t used to standing in massive buildings that have been in continual use for (in the case of the basilica I’m writing about today) 1,200 years.
Yes, the Basilica di Santa Prassede was completed in its original form in the year 822. Think about that. It’s pretty impressive that one branch of my family can be traced back to the 1600’s. Imagine going back even further… back to the time when this church was built. The early middle ages was a long, long time ago.
The building took 42 years to finish, and it was very close to the top of my “must see” list for Rome because of one iconic image that I’ve seen many times in my life.
First of all, I love mosaics, but micro-mosaics particularly intrigue me. The talent required is beyond my comprehension. Then, this basilica takes it a few steps further. Let’s affix these mosaics to a ceiling, and put them on curved surfaces and yet not make the images appear freakishly warped. Oh, yeah, and let’s add gold leaf to the mix to make it even more challenging. Sure! Why not? That level of craftmanship at a time when doctors believed bloodletting was a viable cure for plague just boggles the mind.
Of course, for this post, I had to learn more about the basilica, and I found out that the church is dedicated to Saint Praxedes and her sister Pudentiana, who were the daughters of St. Pudens, believed to be St. Peter’s first Christian convert in Rome. These two sisters apparently lived in the second century and provided aid and comfort to Christians persecuted in the Roman Empire. The church is said to have been built on the former site of Pudentiana’s family’s imperial bath complex. (I have no idea why that wouldn’t be Praxedes’ family too, but there you have it.)
Eight years after it was built, Pope St. Paschal I had it enlarged and started the mosaic decorative program. This was during the Carolingian Renaissance, so the effort got the stamp of approval by Emperor Charlemagne. Fortunately, this beautiful church has been lovingly cared for. Benedictine Monks have done so without interruption since 1198.
Those monks appear to be great businessmen, too. Every church has a box for contributions, but based on personal observation, few tourists drop money in them. But, in order to see these glittering gold mosaics to their best advantage, they have to be lit up. Every alcove had a light, but in order to light that particular mosaic, you have to drop a euro into a slot. Doing so lights the area for 10 to 15 minutes, and then the area goes dark again. Of course, multiple tourists can share the light, but during my visit, I could hear euros dropping throughout the church. What crafty little monks! But as you can see, these mosaics are well worth the euros.
Pope Pascal also had the bones of Praxedes and Pudentiana recovered from the Roman Catacombs. (They had been murdered for providing Christian burial for early martyrs in defiance of Roman law.) Finding their skeletons must have been a challenge. We went down into one of the catacombs, and I’ll be writing about that endless maze of impossible-to-find-your-way-around burials in a later post. Now the sisters (if, in fact, they got the right skeletons) are buried right across from each other in their own crypt as shown below.
I was so fixated on the mosaics, I hadn’t anticipated some of the other interesting elements of the church. Here are some more images for you. I was particularly captivated by the gorgeous marble floor. (I’m convinced that if you were to collect all the marble in all the architecture and sculptures in Italy and put it in a huge pile, it would be taller than Mount Vesuvius.)
But the most unexpected thing was the relic shown below. It is purported to be part of the pillar on which Christ was flogged before his crucifixion in Jerusalem.
Here’s where the “inconvenient truth” part of this blog post comes in. It seems as though most Catholic churches in Europe have one relic or another. It’s almost as if they need something to draw in the crowd. If it’s not the skull of some saint, it’s a fragment of the true cross or the manger, the blood of a saint, the forearm of a sainted king, or the rosary of whosiwhatsis. Of course, there’s absolutely no way to prove any of this, and most adherents wouldn’t want you to try.
But I can tell you this, I look at relics obtained by Saint Helena, such as the column of which we speak, with a particularly jaundiced eye. Let me tell you about dear old Helena. She was the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, an emperor of Rome from 306 to 324 AD. He became a Christian in 312 AD and finally declared tolerance for Christianity in the Roman Empire. (Three cheers for tolerance!)
Born of the lower classes, Helena somehow caught the eye of Constantine’s father, and had a (probably common law) marriage with him long enough to produce Constantine and then be cast aside like an old shoe so that he could marry someone of consequence. He became emperor, and Constantine grew up to go to battle at his father’s side. To make a long story short, dad dies while at war, and Constantine basically says, “I’m emperor now,” and no one contests it. (Go figure.) Helena is suddenly prominent again by dint of being his mother. (The woman was nothing if not an opportunist.)
Helena lived to be about 83, and she was about 65 when her son became a Christian. He, of course, converted her to the faith as well. When she was about 78, she embarked on a 2-year pilgrimage to what the Romans then called “Syria Palaestina” and Jerusalem.
During that pilgrimage, the old woman wandered around spending her son’s money, no doubt followed by a retinue of sycophants. To keep herself entertained she basically decided where all the significant events in Christ’s life occurred, more than 300 years prior to her visit, mainly based on her strong feelings on the subject. She was responsible for the location of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Church of Eleona on the Mount of Olives, sites of Christ’s birth and ascension, the true cross, the nails of the crucifixion as well as rope with which Jesus was tied to the cross, the Holy Tunic, and the location of the Burning Bush in Sinai. Of course, all of this garnered her sainthood when she passed away about 3 years later.
When I hear about relics supposedly recovered by her, or religious sites identified by her, I always imagine an 80-year-old lady having a great deal of fun on her Emperor son’s bottomless bank account after having been poor most of her life. She’s surrounded by hangers-on who are anxious to make her happy while she wanders around exotic lands more than 300 years after Christ’s story played out. I suspect the locals saw her coming a mile away and dreamed up as many ways to make her part with her money as they could.
In a time before postcards and cameras, she randomly picks out places and declares them holy, and people now fight and die over them to this day. But once she makes such declarations, she feels the need to plunder them for souvenirs, and then scatters those souvenirs throughout Christendom. Visitors to various basilicas are gazing at them in reverence even as we speak.
How fortunate that she was able to find wood and rope that was preserved for 300 years without any preservation methods existing. It’s even more fortunate that people reliably passed down, from generation to generation, the exact location where things occurred, including where a bush burned generations ago, despite unrest and upheaval in the area. It’s like a game of telephone that somehow actually worked for 300 years.
Yeah, so there I was, gazing at the pillar where Jesus was flogged. I’m sure it had been sitting there, off in a dusty corner of Jerusalem somewhere, overlooked for centuries by merchants and travelers and residents and refugees, just waiting for Helena to come along and identify it. Wow. Thanks, Helena. Good on you.
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