Checking out this and that in Rome’s Monti neighborhood, where the ancient and the hip are in dialogue, like in Federico Russo’s artwork. x
“We felt permission to be fully ourselves. To express what we thought and felt without apology. To embrace our interests without self-consciousness. To exist with our little quirks without feeling out of place.”
@christine.bingham.art just wrote a great summary of our shared reflections on Italy’s mysterious “italianissimo” for us—check it out on: christinebinghamart.substack.com x
“Unexpected itineraries…” x
It’s hard not to notice that we had the most luck on our trip with the sites that Christine had chosen, and harder still not to note their place in the “Roma Cristiana” layer of the psycho-geographic millefoglie.
This is the Mausoleum of Constantina, a church on the grounds of the Basilica of Saint Agnes Outside the Walls. This funerary hall turned church was built by Emperor Constantine for his daughter Flavia Valeria Constantina, who was venerated as Santa Constanza, even though she has never been officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church – a perfect example of the sort of folk processes that Christine writes about in The Sainthood Project.
But the main reason we were there was because this building sits right next to the ruins of the original basilica of Saint Agnes, which was built by Constantina and which, according to feminist scholars, represents a cultic practice deeply shaped by elite Christian women rather than by bishops or the institutional Church.
From this lens, Santa Constanza herself becomes one of the last great female patrons of an older Christian tradition, soon to be displaced under Pope Damasus I and replaced both physically and symbolically by a male-dominated ecclesiastical landscape. This has been called the “masculinization of Rome’s sacred space.” x
Mass transit in Rome. x
There was something very symbolic about finding the official Basilica, interpreted by feminists as the reassertion of male hierarchy in the church, closed on a Sunday, while having the little church for an early female patron of the cult of Saint Agnes pretty much all to ourselves. x