Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome
Island of peace in a busy city
Rome's a great city but it's sometimes an overwhelming one. The Colosseum, St Peter's, the Pantheon - big sights, built to impress, crowded, busy. If you've done two or three days of sightseeing, you'll be worn out - you need a rest.
And the best place in the whole of Rome to do that is in the cloisters of the convent of Santi Quattro Coronati - the four crowned martyrs.
The fortress like exterior of the monastery rises sheer from the Coelian hill, topped by a massive bell tower, perhaps the oldest in Rome. It's in a backstreet, which may well be deserted. It was when I visited. The gateway is massive and forbidding. It gives you no idea of what's inside. Nor does the rather bleak courtyard inside.
But once you get into the church you start to feel there's something more to this monastery than the brutishness of its façade. The church is small, but elegant, with fine capitals and slender columns under the aisle arcades, and a gloriously coloured apse. It probably dates from the 6c - with the foundations of an older Roman villa underneath it. But after Robert Guiscard's troops burned the church to the ground in 1084, it was drastically reduced in size - all except the apse, which survived, and now looks too large for today's church.
Never mind the church, though - that's not why we're here. Go into the left aisle, and you'll find a doorway with a little bell. Ring the bell, and one of the nuns will let you into the cloister.
It's a cool, serene place, full of the noise of its fountain. Greenery is everywhere. It's a tiny cloister, compared to the big, formal ones at the Lateran, say, or San Paolo fuori le Mura, and that gives it more intimacy. Sit and relax. Meditate or pray, or just chill out.
It's not the architecture that makes the place special - it's the atmosphere.
There is one more treasure to see before it's
time to take on the tourist metropolis again. And you'll have to ring another
bell to see it. The Chapel of St Sylvester has marvellous frescoes dating
from 1257, showing the triumphs of Pope Sylvester. That was a political
message at the time, with the Hohenstaufen emperors trying to liberate themselves
from the pope's influence. But somehow, in this little monastery away from
the centre of things, the fury of those power games seems very far away.