This is an I-Heart podcast.

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

It's time for some catacombs talk.

Yeah. Um, listen, this is a little bit of wish fulfillment for me. Because I have not been to the catacombs in Rome, but I sure want to. It just has not ever happened when I've been there. Now, it's a good excuse to go back. It's on my list for any future visits.

But the story of the Roman catacombs is one that's always been really interesting to me because it is so very different from the story we've told on the show before about the catacombs of Paris.

Rome's are much older. They were created for very different reasons. So we're going to talk about

them today. I want to give you a heads up. If you are a person that knows about them and loves them,

we're not getting into the art. There's a lot of cool art in the Roman catacombs. That could be its

own whole party train, and I would love for it to be. But today we're really talking about, like,

more of the mechanics of how these came to be, why they came to be, et cetera. We're going to

talk about the circumstances that led to their creation, their rediscovery after centuries of

abandonment, and their status today. A description of the Roman catacombs, published in 1857, opens this way, quote,

The Roman catacombs may be briefly described as labyrinths of subterranean galleries crossing one

another in every direction, and here and there opening into chambers more or less lofty and spacious,

the whole hewn with the most exacting regularity out of the living rock,

whose entire walls present a series of narrow shelves one above the other,

evidently excavated for the purpose of receiving the bodies of the dead,

and afterward closed with

facings of tile or marble on which there were often inscribed the names of the persons buried within.

...