I was fortunate enough to be born in Trastevere, to grow up 2km from the Colosseum and go to school halfway between Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain. It was a stroke of luck, but only up until I had to find a parking spot for my four-wheeled vehicle. Until then, the worst thing that happened was being caught by a teacher while plotting to conquer the world and ending up in her bad books. This was my story in fifth grade.
‘You’ll have to visit San Clemente on Sunday and then talk about it to the class,’ my teacher asserted. Despite Maria Montessori featuring on the 1000-lira banknote, the Italian educational system in the ’80s believed the most effective way to shape little humans was to charge students with loads of homework, make them toil endlessly and occasionally punish them. Exploring the famous 12th-century basilica on my only day off was considered a formative task.
I knew the church, as my dad used to work right opposite it, but until then, I had only seen it from the outside. This time, I walked there with my mum, and we descended into the underground, where the remains of a 4th-century, early Christian house of prayers were visible: this was where the Romans held their rites following Constantine’s edict, which apocryphally made Christianity the state religion. After the exploration, I spent the afternoon flipping through the encyclopedia to grasp a few more pieces of information. I learnt that the basilica is one of the pinnacles of Romanesque architecture with its beautiful mosaics, including the Triumph of the Cross. Thus I reported to class and amended my faults.
Two years later, the middle school teacher organised a field trip. ‘Let’s go to San Clemente!’ she announced. It wasn’t a sanction this time, but wasting a rare school trip on a place I had been before felt like it. To my surprise, I discovered that the church had not two but three levels and that the proto-Christians had built their temple upon a Roman structure from the first century CE, a private house or a shrine dedicated to Mithras. I didn’t even have peach fuzz on my chin yet, and concepts like religious syncretism and space-time relativism had bulldozed my innocence.
Four more years passed, and I sported a goatee and long, ’90s-style hair when my high-school art history professor quizzed me, you guessed it, on San Clemente. I knew enough, if not a lot. I was confident until he threw me a curveball. ‘Why is the church important in the history of our language?’ he asked. I was stumped. Two and a half visits weren’t enough to learn that in the church there’s an inscription from the year 1000-something, showing a patrician giving orders to plebeians, urging them to pull a heavy column. It reads – who could ever forget it – ‘Fili de le pute, traite’, loosely ‘Pull it, you sons of bitches’.
On a historical and linguistic level, the articulated preposition ‘de le’ captures a moment in the evolution of the spoken idiom, showing that for centuries, Romans no longer expressed themselves in Latin and not yet in Italian. On an anthropological and cultural level, that ‘pute’ proves that my compatriots have never had qualms about expressing themselves colourfully, with gestures or swear words carved in stone. In a church, no less.
But the most enduring lesson came on a personal level: no matter how many times you visit a church, there’s no way you’ll know it inside out. For the record, Italy has an oversupply of churches, at least 64,000 of them. Plus, there are more than 3000 museums, art galleries, archaeological sites and other cultural institutions. As of 2024, the country boasts 60 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the highest number for any single nation. Good luck thinking you can see all of Italy, let alone know it, or talk about it. Having said that, I’m going to try.
In other words, I wrote this:
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