The Appian Way, the catacombs, the aqueducts and the monumental EUR district - Southern Rome is the city at its most spacious and unexpected.
Last updated August 23, 2026
Southern Rome holds two faces. One is the Appian Way, whose ruins rest among green fields; the other is EUR, the monumental district dreamed up by Mussolini. Post-industrial Ostiense and the boho garden suburb of Garbatella sit between them, along with countryside that feels far from the crowded ancient centre. The area is big, yet public transport links it well; plan a bare minimum of half a day here.
The road runs 212 km to Brindisi, dead straight and paved with stone. West of it, Via Ostiense paints a different picture: in daylight you can admire first-rate classical statuary inside a retired power plant at the Museo Capitoline Centrale Montemartini, while the enormous Basilica di San Paolo Fuori le Mura looms nearby; once night falls, the graffiti-covered factories and warehouses in the neighbourhood morph into a set of the finest clubs in the capital.
The Via Appia Antica joined the UNESCO list in 2024, and one look explains why. This remarkable highway leaves the city towards the south, crossing emerald countryside where trees shade the verges; for the ancients, getting to Brindisi meant five days on the road. It was engineered so Roman troops could advance quickly, and its sides are crowded with grand tombs, while the ground below is honeycombed with catacombs. Today the entire route is a protected zone - a stirring, atmospheric spot for walking or cycling.
In its day the Via Appia ranked among the empire's great highways, and none of its rivals survives as well. Tradition holds that St Peter was out walking here when, after his crucifixion, he met the figure of Jesus coming the other way (the church marking the meeting place is described below). Countless soldiers marched this way towards far-flung provinces, and Spartacus met his end here too: the gladiator slave who rose against the Republic around 73 BCE, slipping down Mt Vesuvius on ropes woven from vines when escape seemed impossible, was ultimately crushed, and his followers - the old accounts say 6000, though a few hundred sounds more plausible - were nailed to crosses beside the Via Appia. The road also earned a cameo in Ripley, the television adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, as a convenient place to get rid of a corpse.
For bikes and e-bikes (€4/€8 per hour) go to Eco Bike Roma, based at the Appia Antica Regional Park Information Centre, which also arranges excursions on foot, on two wheels or in a golf cart. The regional park spreads over 4580 hectares, and two wheels are by far the smartest way to take it all in. The catacombs are strictly tour-only, but every other site along the way accepts independent visitors daily except Monday. Away from the Via Appia's main axis, with its churches, villas and tombs, the Caffarella Valley - grazed by livestock - and the aqueducts await, monuments to the engineering that reshaped the world.
This small church stands exactly where St Peter, running away from Rome, reportedly came face to face with Jesus heading the other way. Peter's question was 'Domine, quo vadis?' - roughly 'where are you heading, Lord?' - and the reply came back 'Venio Roman iterum crucifigi' (I am returning to Rome, and there I will be crucified once more). Accepting his fate, Peter trudged back into the city, where he was taken prisoner and put to death. Replicas of Christ's footprints stand in the aisle; the originals reside in the Basilica di San Sebastiano.
This road offered the dead a prime address: it sat dead centre on a busy artery, yet beyond the city walls, where hygiene rules demanded that the dead be laid to rest. From the 2nd century CE through the 5th, early Christians committed their departed to catacombs. The very word 'cemetery' descends from the Greek 'koimētērion', meaning 'dormitories' - because this was only a stopover on the road to heaven.
The biggest, busiest catacombs in Rome, and the burial ground chosen by the early Roman Church as its own. The tunnels, dug out from the late 2nd century and named for Pope Calixtus I, extend roughly 20 km in the portions explored so far, holding the graves of 16 popes, 63 martyrs and vast numbers of ordinary Christians. St Cecilia, music's patron saint, lay here until her body was carried off to the Basilica di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere; later, when she was dug up in 1599, more than a millennium after dying, she was said to be uncorrupted - the pose immortalised by Stefano Maderno's delicate sculpture, a copy of which is kept here. The tours convey the sheer extent of the galleries snaking underground. A nearly 1 km access lane leads to the site, running beside the Via Appia Antica but far more peaceful, lined with shade trees and offering wide views.
Official site →One of Rome's biggest and earliest catacombs, its galleries running about 17 km. The complex grew up on land owned by Flavia Domitilla, the emperor Domitian's niece and scion of the powerful Flavian clan. What sets it apart are the remarkably intact Christian frescoes and the partly sunken Chiesa di SS Nereus e Achilleus, built in the 4th century CE - an airy, column-lined space honouring a pair of Roman soldiers martyred under Diocletian.
Official site →Underneath the Basilica di San Sebastiano lie the tunnels that gave catacombs their name - the term joins Greek kata, meaning near, and kymbas, meaning cavity, since the site sat beside a quarry. Interments began in the 1st century (traditionally including Peter and Paul among the first burials), mausoleums arrived in the 2nd century and the catacombs proper in the 3rd. Keep an eye out for graffiti scratched by pilgrims of old at the graves.
Official site →The fringes of Rome gave its grandest citizens room to spread out in a way the packed centre never could, and this spot was a favourite for spacious country villas. One such residence was the sprawling palace of the emperor Maxentius, built in the 4th century and laid out around three elements: the dwelling itself, a tomb and a racecourse shaped like a lozenge. The Circo di Massenzio, a chariot track seating 10,000, survives in excellent shape. The Mausoleo di Romolo, inside the same grounds, was raised for Maxentius' son Romulus, who died aged 17; possibly modelled on a mini Pantheon, it carried a big dome and stood within a ring of columns, fragments of which remain. Oddly, an 18th-century dwelling is bolted onto it, raised by the Torlonia clan, which once owned this entire district, Villa dei Quintili included, as its country estate, having grown rich managing Vatican finances.
Official site →A tower-like tomb from the 1st century BCE looms above the road, its burial chamber now open to the sky. Cecilia Metella, whose father was the consul Quintus Metellus Creticus, linked two great houses through marriage - she also married into the family of Crassus, who bankrolled Julius Caesar. In the 14th century the Caetani clan, relatives of Pope Boniface VIII, fortified the mausoleum and used it to bully passers-by into forking over a toll. In the family's former palace, a display of objects recovered along the road includes a coin struck in 64-66 CE bearing Nero's head. The travertine outer walls are carved with a band of ox skulls, festoons and Gaelic shields.
Official site →This Roman villa's remains surfaced when workmen digging a swimming pool on a private estate struck ancient masonry. The name, meaning 'head of the ox', refers to the ox-head carvings on Cecilia Metella's nearby tomb. Set among the regional park's countryside, the ruins - mosaics plus the traces of a private bathhouse - conjure up the comforts of a well-to-do Roman household. Also worth seeing is the photographic exhibition on how the modern city has crept over the Appian Way, plus the campaigns to preserve it.
Official site →Rising above the fields, this 2nd-century estate, as big as a small town, is one of Rome's overlooked treasures. It belonged to two consular brothers, the Quintilii - and their wealth proved fatal. The emperor Commodus, an egomaniac, coveted the place, had the pair killed and installed himself. He enlarged the property, and the ruins remain deeply impressive even though digging has uncovered only a fraction of it. The baths are the standout, with a pool, a hot bath or caldarium, and a cold one or frigidarium. The tower nearest the Via Appia, the nymphaeum, became a stronghold of the Tusculum counts, then rulers of Lazio, during the Middle Ages. The floors of the Antiquarium suggest the original opulence, as do finds such as a superb statue of Zeus. You can enter the whole site from the Via Appia Antica or, further east, along the full length of Via Appia Nuova, served by decent buses.
Roughly five miles of deep history from the Appian Way's start, this ruin began as a tomb of the 1st century BCE. Down the centuries it doubled as a watchtower, farmhouse and stable, among other roles. Today it is a romantically battered jumble, and for many visitors it signals the finish of the trek down the Via Appia, whether you walk or cycle.
Tip: The C11 and 765 bus routes run along the Via di Torricola right past the site, yet there is no stop nearby and drivers refuse to let anyone on or off.
This 5th-century gate, the most imposing of the Aurelian Wall's openings, stands where the Appian Way begins. Ettore Muti, secretary of the National Fascist Party, made his home here during WWII. The gate now shelters the Museo delle Mura, whose great attraction is the chance to pace the crenellated terrace above the gate and roughly 400m of the wall's circuit itself. First called Porta Appia, the gateway was rechristened in honour of pilgrims passing beneath it towards the San Sebastiano catacombs.
Roughly 500m southeast of the Santa Domitilla catacombs, a peaceful-looking spot conceals a grim chapter of history. Here, on 24 March 1944, German forces executed 335 Italians in reprisal for an attack by partisans, and this mausoleum commemorates them. The caves were blown up with mines to entomb the victims; after the conflict, the bodies were recovered, identified and reinterred in the sequence they were found. The 336 tombs include one extra, set aside for every other victim of Nazi atrocities. A compact but absorbing museum recounts the resistance's work and the events that led to the massacre.
Official site →Ostiense is Rome's former industrial heartland, and it shows its history openly: vast power stations and warehouses, many daubed with graffiti, that after dark host some of the city's liveliest clubs. In daylight the district rewards a visit for its museums and for the enormous basilica at its southern end.
A few minutes' walk from the Piramide metro stop in Ostiense stands Rome's most unusual museum: an adventurous offshoot of the Capitolini collections that sets classical sculpture against diesel engines and immense furnaces. The building was the city's first public power station, switched on in 1912 and renamed a year later for Giovanni Montemartini, the city's technology councillor, who passed away mid-session at a council gathering. In the hall called the Sala Caldaia, statues pose around the great furnace - among them the Fanciulla Seduta, literally Seated Girl, and the Musa Polimnia (Muse Polyhymnia) - plus superb Roman mosaics showing hunting scenes and dishes of food. Boiler Room 2 holds Pope Pius IX's splendid train wagons, built in France in 1858: an Art Nouveau glimpse of 19th-century papal travel, chapel car included, with the interiors shown on screens.
Official site →After St Peter's, this is Rome's biggest church - and the third-largest on earth - standing on the site of St Paul's burial after his beheading in 67 CE. Surprisingly few visitors make the trip, though it lies close to the centre beside the Basilica San Paolo metro stop. Constantine raised the first church here in the 4th century; Pope Siricius rebuilt it in 390 after it proved too small. Earthquakes, floods, fires and looters all took their toll, culminating in the terrible blaze of 1823 and a reconstruction later that century - the present building mixes what survived with what was renewed. It ranks among Rome's five papal basilicas and its seven pilgrimage churches. Do not miss the colourful 13th-century Cosmati mosaics adorning the cloister columns of the neighbouring Benedictine abbey, a lovely corner scented with lavender. Treasures that escaped the fire include the 5th-century triumphal arch, its mosaics heavily restored, and the marble tabernacle in Gothic style above the high altar, with a design from around 1285 credited to Arnolfo di Cambio, possibly working with Pietro Cavallini. Beside the altar, on its right, stands the ornate Romanesque Paschal candlestick, carved in the 12th century by Nicolò di Angelo and Pietro Vassalletto; it parades a menagerie of beast-headed figures. Higher up, under the nave windows, portraits depict each pope from St Peter onwards; legend warns that the world will end once no space remains for one more portrait - and after Francis, only six blanks are left. The ground beneath the High Altar was dug out, so you can now gaze on the site of St Paul's sarcophagus.
Official site →A darling of filmmakers, Quartiere Garbatella began life as a garden suburb built to house workers, modelled on the English garden-city idea of planner Ebenezer Howard. The regime later pressed it into service for Romans displaced by Mussolini's demolition work in the centre. The plan grouped low blocks of flats (lotti) around green courtyards - 62 of them - blending baroque and rationalist idioms. In its early days the quarter felt like a remote little town on the city's edge. Innocenzo Sabbatini, the Roman School's star architect, designed the brick-red Albergo Rosso with its clocktower. Later blocks went up bigger and faster as demand soared, but the original lotti remain a delight to explore. Piazza Benedetto Brin, the district's front door, is marked by an arch beneath which the first block rose in 1920; Via Luigi Orlando offers a fine look at the lotti and leads to the focal Piazza Bartolomeo Romano, home to another Sabbatini landmark, the Teatro Palladium.
This starkly rationalist quarter of straight lines was Mussolini's fantasy of himself in imperial Roman guise: enormous public buildings of white marble, rows of blank-faced columns and friezes celebrating fascist triumphs. Fellini adored it, saying it was like dwelling within a framed picture. It was conceived for an international exposition slated for 1942; the war scuppered the event, but the name endured - Esposizione Universale di Roma, the Roman Universal Exhibition, shortened to EUR.
The district's showpiece is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, nicknamed the Square Colosseum, its 216 arches clad in gleaming travertine. Standing empty through most of the decades after 1943, it has housed the Fendi headquarters since 2015 and often mounts displays at street level. Not far away, the enormous columned Palazzo degli Uffici bears a frieze recounting Rome's history as the regime wished it told when the building went up in 1939: the band begins with the twins Romulus and Remus up top, then descends through the ages to Il Duce (the boss, as Mussolini styled himself) himself, who is worshipped by men, women and infants alike while soldiers salute. About 15m further south, a statue called the Genius of Sport is more propaganda left over, with a thin disguise: put up in 1939 as Genius of Fascism while EUR was still rising, it received the most superficial post-war makeover - a fresh name and a couple of antique boxing gloves. Some eighty years after that arm first went up, the figure still makes the fascist salute; the gloves fool nobody. In the middle of the wide boulevard nearby, the Obelisco di Marconi, in pseudo-Egyptian style and a Mussolini favourite, shows the usual brawny workers at their labours; its real draw is as a viewing platform from which to take in the rationalist lines of the district's heart.
The district also wraps around the laghetto, a lovely lake for a sunny-day walk where kayaks and boats can be hired. The newest arrival is the congress complex by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, the Roma Convention Centre, known as La Nuvola (2016): a clear glass-and-steel envelope named Le Theca - literally 'the shrine' - wraps the organic form of La Nuvola, meaning 'the cloud', a great floating bubble housing a hall and meeting rooms for up to 8000 people. A black tower beside it, La Lama - Italian for 'the blade' - houses the conference crowds. Fuksas' other landmark projects: the Fiera Milano exhibition grounds in Milan, plus Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport.
Largely ignored by visitors, this museum blends the city's ethnographic holdings with prehistoric material and objects from Rome's oriental museum collection.
Official site →The biggest public pool in Rome - and such pools are scarce. This 23m-by-50m open-air basin dates from the 1960 Olympics. It fills up fast, above all at weekends, so come early to claim a deck chair by the water and watch the aqua aerobics show from a reclining position.
Official site →A few blocks from the Giulia Agricola metro stop, amid a busy residential quarter crisscrossed by the frantic Via Toscalana, an unexpected calm opens up: the Parco degli Acquedotti, 240 hectares of rolling green belonging to the Appia Antica National Park. Striding across it are the colossal remains of several of the aqueducts that kept Rome alive - as grand as the Colosseum, yet almost nobody visits them. Seven aqueducts once fed the city through this zone: Anio Vetus and Anio Novus, then Aqua Marcia, next Aqua Tepula, then Aqua Iulia, and Aqua Claudia, plus the Felix Aqueduct, still working, which Pope Sixtus V built in 1585 riding directly above the Aqua Marcia. Many channels are buried, so not all are visible. Aqua Claudia, with its double tiers of arches, is the showpiece: started under Caligula and finished under Claudius, the channel ran 45 miles across the countryside in an era when Rome's population topped a million. The Aqua Marcia was the longest, carrying water 56 miles. The park also preserves traces of the great Villa delle Vignacce - the work of Quinto Servilio Pudente, himself a wealthy brickmaker of Hadrian's day, as its brick stamps reveal (the Romans labelled everything) - with a water tank that supplied its baths among the remains.
MURo (Museo di Urban Art di Roma - 'wall' in Italian, and also short for 'museum of urban art') is less a museum than a scattering of murals through the Quadraro district in Rome's southern suburbs. Artist David Diavù founded this open-air collection in 2010, and it has since branched out to other edges of the city. The walls carry works by close to twenty international street artists, from Ron English's eerie green Baby Hulk to a nude in the manner of Modigliani and, on Via del Monte del Grano, a menacing swarm of crawling wasps. That piece, Nido di Vespe (Wasp's Nest), painted by Luca Maleonte, a Roman artist, alludes to the label the neighbourhood carried under the Nazi occupation in WWII. Start with the dense band of murals lining the street called Via dei Lentuli. A Google map on the MURo site lets you hunt them down yourself, but the regular walking and cycling tours - see the website - make the most of the quarter.
The Appian Way is hardly the only ancient road worth seeking out down here. Between today's Via Appia and the Via Tuscolana, inside the national park, a surviving stretch of the old Via Latina runs near the Parco degli Acquedotti. It paralleled the Appian Way as an alternative route, keeping company with the Aqua Claudia near the Roma Vecchia farmhouse. The Via Latina is older than Rome itself, having served the Etruscans, and linked Rome with Capua over mountains and across rivers, just as the Via Appia did. It too attracted funerary monuments wherever the visibility was best - and so its tombs are splendid.
In this little-visited corner of the park, grand Roman tombs of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE stand among soft green fields, the old road lined with umbrella pines. First brought to light in the 19th century by the amateur archaeologist Leonardo Fortunati, they have lately been restored and look remarkably intact, with stucco, mosaic and fresco remnants inside. The setting is rural and evocative. Pride of place goes to the red-brick Sepolcro Barberini - so called after the family that owned this land - a two-storey tomb of the 2nd century BCE and a precious document of Roman funerary architecture. Nearby stand tombs belonging to the Corneli, Valeri and Pancrazi families.
Official site →Italy's leading film studio, created in 1937 on Mussolini's orders to mass-produce propaganda pictures - its first production was Scipione l'Africano, a hymn to the Italian army in Ethiopia. The venture boomed, producing hundreds of pictures a year and keeping going through the early war years until bombing halted production. The unmistakably fascist-era sound stages still host international and local shoots, lured by modern facilities and tax incentives. Weekend tours open the doors: the colossal Venusia head - the one that rose out of Venice's lagoon in Fellini's Casanova - stands in the garden, and visitors pass through full-scale ancient-Rome sets, then down into the American sub S-33 built for U-571, from director Jonathan Mostow; the underwater sequences were shot in Teatro 5. The exhibitions dig deep into the studio's output - Roman Holiday, Barbarella and everything between - and its great directors: Pasolini, Fellini, Scorsese - with hands-on activities such as sketching a costume design.
Official site →On Sundays, cars are barred from the park, making it the best day for walking or cycling. On other days, the busiest stretch is between Porta San Sebastiano and the Chiesa del Domine Quo Vadis; beyond the church it gets much quieter.
Each catacomb closes one day a week, but the days differ, so at least one is always open: San Callisto is closed Wednesdays (and from mid-January until mid-February), while Santa Domitilla closes Tuesdays (and from mid-December until mid-January). All of them can only be visited with a tour.
Eco Bike Roma, at the Appia Antica Regional Park's information point, rents bikes and e-bikes for €4/€8 per hour and arranges excursions on foot, on two wheels or in a golf cart. Two wheels are the ideal way to cover the long road, though the big Roman flagstones are rough - stick to the paths that run along the side.
Metro line B calls at Piramide (for Ostiense and the Centrale Montemartini), then Garbatella, then Basilica di San Paolo, then EUR Palasport and EUR Fermi. Buses 23 and 769 run along Via Ostiense, and 77, 118 and 218 reach Porta San Sebastiano, where the Appian Way begins.
Budget five hours for the full outing: travel time, the sights along the way and one catacomb tour. The classic route runs from south to north. The road starts roughly six and a half kilometres south of the centre, beyond the city walls; a taxi from downtown costs around €20, though cabbies with delicate suspension may refuse the job, since the ancient paving rattles the car to bits. Ask the driver to drop you five or ten minutes south of Capo di Bove, then walk back towards the tomb along the quietest stretch of the old road. Alternatively, bus 118, about three an hour, serves the whole route, stopping near the Tomb of Cecilia Metella and at the Domine Quo Vadis church, and brings you back to the centre at the end.
The tour proper begins on the original pavement. Huge basalt blocks form a road about four metres wide, grooved by centuries of chariot wheels; the random alignment of the stones shows they have long since shifted from their original positions. In its heyday the central strip carried animal-drawn vehicles, while pedestrians used the raised walkways on either side, which survive to this day. Cypresses and umbrella pines line the way, and the first stretch outside the city ran arrow-straight, as Roman engineers liked their roads. The road was begun in 312 BCE and named for the censor Appius Claudius Caecus; it linked Rome with Capua, near Naples, running in a straight line for much of its course. Near the top corner, watch for the waist-high original milestone III, one of more than four hundred markers that counted the miles from Rome to Brindisi.
This was a prestigious address for the dead. Roman law banned burials within the city walls, so great families lined the approach roads with monuments where everyone could admire them: pyramids, little private temples, altars and tombs beneath the pines. Picture the funeral processions winding out through the gates. Early Christians went underground instead, and their catacombs honeycomb the ground beneath this very roadside.
About 200 yards past the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, the ruins of the Circus and Villa of Maxentius stand open and free. Maxentius was the emperor defeated by Constantine in 312 CE, and his suburban estate rewards a hundred-yard detour. The centrepiece is the enormous former chariot racetrack: walk in between the entrance towers and along the long central spine, imagining the chariots thundering round while 10,000 spectators cheered. Maxentius watched the hairiest bend from a box rising above the terraces, and at the far end of the 260-yard track stands the small triumphal arch beneath which the winning driver rode off to claim his prize. Just down the road, behind a square wall of ruins enclosing a modern building, you can glimpse the circular mausoleum built for his son Romulus. Free, though donations are welcome; Tuesday to Sunday 10am-4pm or later, closed Mondays.
The stretch between the San Sebastiano catacombs and the Domine Quo Vadis church is the road at its least interesting and most dangerous: narrow, with almost no shoulder, and busy with traffic. Skip it. A tree-lined pedestrian and bike path begins about 30 yards north of the San Sebastiano catacombs, at the junction with Via delle Sette Chiese (enter through the arch at number 126). Lined with the fourteen stations of the cross, it runs through a peaceful park parallel to the road, taking pilgrims straight to the San Callisto catacombs. On Wednesdays the gate is locked, and you must stay on the Via Appia Antica itself, keeping your wits about you. From San Callisto the path continues about three-quarters of a mile to a busy three-way junction, where the little church appears.
The tiny church of Domine Quo Vadis, also called Santa Maria in Palmis, was built in the 9th century and redone in the 17th, on the spot where Peter, fleeing Nero's persecution, saw a vision of Christ and asked 'Lord, where are you going?' Christ replied that he was coming to Rome to be crucified again, and the chastened Peter turned back to face his fate. Inside the nave, a stone is marked with what are supposedly Christ's footprints; a fresco of Peter adorns the left wall and one of Jesus the right, and a bust honours Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Polish Nobel laureate whose historical novel inspired the 1951 film Quo Vadis. The church is free and open daily from 8am to 8pm, until 7pm from November to March.
South of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella the Appian Way is at its most atmospheric: quieter, less touristed, downhill for the most part, and lined with cypresses, pines and crumbling tombs. On a bike you rattle over rough paving stones (or along the dirt sidewalks) for up to half an hour to reach a big pyramid-shaped ruin perched on a tiny base, then five minutes more to the rear of the Villa dei Quintili. From the back you usually cannot enter, but the semicircular nymphaeum, an artificial grotto, is worth the look. Enjoy a picnic, then turn around and grind back up the long hill. Bus 118 also serves the villa, stopping at the main entrance on the Via Appia Nuova.
Rome's catacombs are underground cemeteries where early Christians buried their dead. Roman law forbade burials inside the walls, and while pagans mostly cremated, Christians, expecting bodily resurrection, insisted on burial. Land was expensive and most Christians poor, so wealthy families allowed their plots to be used: even a small field could open the way to miles of free tunnelling below. Roughly forty catacombs are known, scattered outside the ancient walls. The word itself means 'near the quarry', since several were dug into the exposed faces of abandoned stone pits. Between the first and fifth centuries, Christians carved out more than 300 miles of tomb-lined galleries, stacked up to five layers deep in the soft volcanic tuff, which is easy to cut yet hardens on contact with air. They dug ever deeper partly to squeeze more use out of donated land and partly to lie close to saints and martyrs.
The dead were wrapped in linen, following Christ's example, and interred without embalming, since the Second Coming was thought to be close at hand; the galleries were called a dormitorio, a resting place for the dead until the promised return. Each grave was sealed with a stone slab, though most were later smashed by looters and vandals. When Constantine legalised Christianity in 313, the cult of the martyrs took on a new role: pilgrims began journeying to the graves of the early popes and saints. In the 800s, with barbarian raiders plundering the tombs, the relics were moved to safety inside the city's churches, and the catacombs were forgotten for a thousand years, until early modern excavators reopened them for the Grand Tour. Romantic writers spun a tale of persecuted Christians hiding in the candlelit galleries, but the story is fiction: by the second century Rome held over a million people, and its ten thousand Christians had no need to camp underground. Instead they lived openly, melting into the vast city.
Touring a catacomb today means entering a space the churches that run it still hold sacred. You climb down the same staircases and walk the same lanes as the first Christians, 1,500 years ago. The ceilings seem oddly high because galleries were enlarged by digging down, never up; the chisel marks left in the tuff have survived every century since. You will see arches that mark family tombs, and thousands of burial slots, the loculi, each cut to the size of the body it held; roughly 40 percent of them are child-sized, a blunt reminder of infant mortality in the ancient world. No bones remain in view: with modern tourism, the sacred remains were moved to sections closed to the public. The walls carry some of the oldest Christian art in existence, going back to the third century, rich in symbolism that worked as a secret language: the dove for the soul, the peacock for immortality, the shepherd carrying a lamb, Christ as the good shepherd, the fish because the first letters of 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour' spelled the Greek word for fish, the chi-rho monogram, and the anchor, a disguised cross. Fragments survive stamped with a mason's hallmark, and a second-century bishop asked on his tomb: 'All who understand these things, pray for me.'
The two big catacombs on this stretch offer essentially the same experience: a guided walk past thousands of third-century burial niches, with a good guide speaking English. The difference is in the feel. San Callisto runs a larger operation: many more visitors, groups as large as fifty people, a bigger gift shop and a food truck for snacks; underground it feels bigger too, with wider galleries, more tombs of early popes and more early-Christian frescoes, and the whole experience runs about ten minutes longer, after a stand-up introduction in a classroom. San Sebastiano feels more private: smaller parties, guides you can actually ask questions, and the only chance to see pagan mausoleums alongside the Christian niches, while its Baroque church holds a Bernini work.
San Sebastiano takes its name from the Christian soldier martyred by archers while bound to a post, a subject artists have painted for centuries. Tradition holds that Peter and Paul were said to have lain here for some decades during the third century, and a subterranean chapel once held Sebastian's own remains. Above ground, the basilica displays the saint's presumed relics in the first chapel on the left, watched over by a statue of his arrow-riddled body; a chapel across the nave exhibits the arrow that pierced him, a slice of the post he was bound to, and the footprints reputed to be the very ones from the Quo Vadis story. Nearby stands Bernini's bust of The Saviour, known as Il Salvatore, with its ringlets: his last work, done in his eighties. San Callisto, named for its first caretaker, was the official cemetery of Rome's early Church, where nine popes of the third century were laid to rest along with other bishops and many martyrs; the most famous is St Cecilia, music's patron, whose grave carries a copy of the renowned Maderno sculpture. Glass cases protect cubicles painted with third-century frescoes, among the first Christian art ever made.
Bus 118 is the workhorse for the Appian Way: it leaves the centre roughly three times an hour and stops near the Tomb of Cecilia Metella or, riding to the end, at the Domine Quo Vadis church. A taxi from downtown costs about €20, and the driver may well grumble about the ancient potholes; a cab with weak suspension might refuse outright. Coming back, taxis are harder to find, since there are no taxi ranks on the road: call one or summon it with an app. Tickets for the bus are sold at only a few points along the route, so buy your return ticket before you set out, or tap a contactless card on boarding.
Two bike shops serve the road, one at each end: Ecobikes at the north end inside the Appia Antica Service Center, and Bicycl-e Roma at the southern end, at the Appia Antica Caffè. Both hire out urban, mountain and electric models at comparable rates, hand out maps with suggested routes, including a 30-minute ride out to the aqueduct park, and keep a good stock. If you truly intend to pedal on the old stones, the mountain bikes are worth the upgrade; the elevated sidewalks make a fine trail. You cannot pick up at one shop and drop off at the other, so plan a round trip. Sunday is the day for it, when cars are banned from the road.