third century, must be sought the crypt where S. Cecilia lay for more than six centuries.
First he discovered that adjoining the official Papal Crypt was another chamber, evidently of considerable size, in which a luminare[1] had been constructed, but the chamber and the luminare were choked up with earth and ruins. He proceeded to excavate the latter; as the work proceeded, the explorers in the neighbourhood of the chamber came upon the remains of paintings.
Lower down, almost on the level of the chamber, these paintings became more numerous and more distinct. The work of digging out went on slowly; more paintings had evidently once decorated that ruined and desolate chamber of death—one of them, a woman richly dressed, obviously represented S. Cecilia. Another of a bishop inscribed with the name of S. Urbanus, the bishop connected with the story of the saint. The paintings were of different dates, some as late as the seventh century. A door which once led into the Papal Crypt was found: remains of much and elaborate decorative work were plainly discerned, work of various ages, belonging some of it to the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries.
In one of the walls of the chamber a large opening had been originally constructed to receive the sarcophagus of the martyr.
All showed clearly that this had once been a very famous historic crypt, the resort of many generations of pilgrims, and its situation answered exactly to what we read in the Pilgrim Itineraries, in the Liber Pontificalis, and in other ancient authorities as the situation of the original burying-place of S. Cecilia. The subjects, too, of the dim discoloured paintings pointed to the same conclusion.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the sepulchral chamber De Rossi counted some twelve or thirteen inscriptions telling of Christian members of the "gens Cæcilia" who had been buried there—all testifying to the fact that originally this
- ↑ A "luminare" (plural "luminaria") was a shaft communicating with the surface of the ground which admitted light and air. Many of these were constructed by Pope Damasus in the fourth century for the sake of pilgrims visiting the historic crypts.
