Burial underground is an ancient tradition, but burial in a catacomb is different. A catacomb is a place of underground burial, but not in the traditional "six feet under," individual manner. The catacomb I visited outside Rome consists of layer after layer of small chambers carved into dirt walls. A path leads down, down, down, with burial niches to the left and right. Various branches split off from the central path and lead to even more layers of niches.

Sorry to say, I took no pictures underground. Maybe one wasn't supposed to; I don't remember.  What I really think is that I was so fascinated by the antiquity of the place, and the mystery of it, that I forgot I had a camera!

I call the burial places niches because they seem so very small. Maybe the people were smaller in olden days, but one has to wonder how crowded the burial slots must have been.

The Roman catacombs came into use sometime around the second century A.D. In story, Christians needed to hide their dead from persecuting Romans. In fact, a shortage of land was as much a motivating factor as secrecy.

The rock under Rome worked well for catacomb building, as it was soft when dug but hardened when it was exposed to air. Everything looks rough, as if you could measure the size of the diggers' shovels in the dents in the wall. Ventilation shafts going from the tunnels to the ground kept (and keep) air flowing into the chambers below.

Some of the catacombs were huge by any standard. They were complex structures of passages and niches that could lie some 62 feet below the ground level and cover nearly 600 acres.

And I was right about the size. Looking up the topic, I found that the niches, called by the Romans loculi, measured only about 2 feet high by about 50 inches (a little over 4 feet) long. Narrow steps that go down as many as four stories join the levels. A body was wrapped in linen and went into its chamber in a stone sarcophagus. Then the niche was covered with a stone slab showing the deceased's name, age, and other information.

Most fascinating to me were the numerous oil lamp pots, some the size of a matchbook and some larger, scattered all over the place, in niches and along the passage-ways. These were left-behinds that show how primitive the lighting must have been in the passages. Today, the passages are lit (dimly) by electric lights for the benefit of tourists like me.

Smelling the rich dirt and whatever other mysterious smells remain down there, I tried to imagine coming to visit a departed family member or friend, using a tiny lamp to light my way along the dark tunnels. It was a moving experience, feeling the place as it must have been when full and before it was looted, with other people coming and going quietly along the passage-ways.

When we came out, I was happy to get back to grass level and enjoy the Italian sun!

The catacombs were a repository for many works of art. Though the goth Roman invaders pillaged these burial places, much art remains.

To the right you see a fourth-century painting from the Commodilla Catacomb, showing a bearded Christ. I learned that until around the fourth century, Christ was generally portrayed as young and clean-shaven, but here he looks older and has the mature-looking beard.

Many frescoes (paintings on wet plaster) were among the art of the catacombs. Here you see a fresco showing Christ's fish and loaves, from the Catacombs of San Callisto.

The Catholic catacombs contained much of the Christian art--in sculpture and fresco--created before 400 A.D.; they housed significant contributions to Christian art history. Jewish communities also created catacombs, which provided similar insight into Jewish art of the same era.

Many Catholic martyrs were said to be buried in the catacombs, so the catacombs were used in Christianity's early years for various ceremonies.

The painting shown on the right gives a beautiful idea of what I imagined when I thought of using one of the tiny oil lamps to light my way through a passage-way. The painting depicts a passage that seems much higher than the ones I was in, and the niches in the painting are neatly carved into arches. What I saw were raw holes in the walls, variously shaped, with scraggles of broken rock from the stone seals that had fallen (or had been taken) away.

Still, the torchlit picture is a beautiful way to think of these convolute corridors, which housed the mostly forgotten dead of so long ago. As everyone also learned in Latin class (see my Rome piece), requiescat in pace, all.