After our special mass in St Peter’s on that Sunday, May 1st, we took an underground train to the station near Piazza Barberini where we had to meet Barbara from Viator Tours. Again we were very impressed with the intelligence and enthusiasm of the guide provided by this company. See www.viator.com for small group guided tours if you are planning a visit to Rome.
Rome’s underground rail service.
My legs were aching as a result of so much walking. Thank goodness I had packed my ‘shooting stick’- a walking stick that turns into a seat at the touch of a button. I had seen travellers from UK and Europe using them on previous trips and was determined to find one here in Australia. They’re made from lightweight aluminium and fold down to fit into a case or even a backpack. I was the envy of every other tired traveller.
Catacombe Di Domitilla 
was our first stop, a short distance from the piazza. We entered a church-like area, not far below ground level, then followed our leader along narrow passages and down steep, uneven stairways, many of them lined with burial spaces, now empty. At school we were taught that the Christians used the catacombs to hide from their Roman persecutors, but being so close to the surface and so obvious to the Romans, it soon became clear that this was a fiction told to us by gullible nuns.
After nearly two thousand years there was no lingering smell of decay but, during the time they were used as Christian burial chambers, the stench and the threat of disease must have made them unpleasant and dangerous places.
Barbara told us that the workers (those digging the spaces in the walls and positioning the dead) could only stay down there for a limited time in the fetid, poorly ventilated spaces. The material in the catacombs is largely tufa, a soft, porous stone formed from volcanic ash that’s easily dug out.
The fish is used to signify Christians. This was on the wall outside the catacomb.
As expected, we found plenty of carvings and drawings of fish, the symbol used by early Christians. All burial spaces were small, but sometimes a family was wealthy enough to have reserved a cave-like area where they could ultimately all be buried together. Some of these have been decorated with pictures of saints or images of stories and characters taken from the New Testament. The paintings are primitive, but, considering their age, most are still remarkably colourful and well preserved. These are not the work of great artists like we see in the later church buildings, but simply a way to keep Jesus and his teachings, in the minds of the early Christians.
Photos were not permitted here or in any of the underground places we visited that day, so we had to be satisfied with memories and a few postcards. The photos I have used here were taken by my sister, Susanne Fergusson.