San Clemente

San Clemente tickets: which one to buy

The upper church is free. The ticket, bought at a desk in the sacristy, is for the excavations below and is inexpensive; it is the reason everyone comes and it cannot be skipped if you want to understand the building. Audio guides are available and a printed plan is included. Guided tours of underground Rome include San Clemente and cost several times the ticket, which is fair value here because the three levels are confusing without help.

The basilica is on Via Labicana, five minutes from the Colosseum, and there is no need to book except for groups. Photography is forbidden in the lower levels, strictly enforced by the Irish Dominicans who have run the church since 1667 and who excavated it from 1857. The bookshop by the entrance sells the excavation report and a plan of all three levels, which is the best thing to read before going down.

Visiting San Clemente: what to see

San Clemente is a section cut through nineteen centuries of Rome. At street level is a basilica finished about 1100, with a schola cantorum of carved marble reused from its predecessor, a twelfth-century apse mosaic of the cross as a vine spreading over the whole golden semidome, and a chapel frescoed by Masolino in the 1420s. Down one flight is the fourth-century basilica it replaced, buried when the upper church was built, with faded frescoes including an eleventh-century scene whose Latin captions contain the earliest written vernacular Italian, a landlord swearing at his servants.

Down another flight are first-century Roman buildings, an alley between them, and a Mithraeum with a carved altar showing Mithras killing the bull. Water runs audibly through a channel at the lowest level and has never been traced. The Mithraeum retains its stone benches where initiates reclined for ritual meals, and a school room beside it held the cult's teaching. The apse mosaic contains more than a hundred small scenes of daily life among the vine scrolls, including a farmer feeding chickens and a man on a donkey.

San Clemente opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily with a break in the middle of the day and a shorter Sunday morning schedule; the last entry to the excavations is well before closing. The lower levels are humid and about ten degrees cooler than the street, which is welcome in August and chilly in January. Numbers below are limited and a queue can form in the late morning.

The mosaic in the upper church is lit on a timer. Dress code is applied. Allow an hour for all three levels. The Colosseum is five minutes west, the Lateran basilica ten minutes east, and Santi Quattro Coronati with its thirteenth-century frescoes is two minutes uphill. The church is Irish-run and has a Dominican community, and mass is said in English on Sunday mornings.