Santa Balbina, Minor basilica on Aventine Hill, Rome, Italy
Santa Balbina is an early Christian minor basilica on Aventine Hill in Rome, laid out as a single hall with an open wooden roof truss and six side chapels. The chapels line the interior walls and hold frescoes and oil paintings from different periods, making the building a kind of visual record of Roman church art.
The church was built in the 4th century over the remains of a Roman house that had belonged to Lucius Fabius Cilo, a consul and city prefect, in the late 2nd century. Major restoration work carried out in the early 20th century brought the building closer to its original early Christian form.
The 13th-century episcopal chair inside the church is decorated with Cosmatesque inlays, a style that uses small pieces of marble and colored glass arranged in geometric patterns. This type of decoration was widespread in medieval Rome and remains one of the most recognizable features of the interior today.
The basilica sits on Aventine Hill and can be reached on foot from the Via di Santa Balbina or by climbing the stairway on Via Baccelli near the San Saba neighborhood. The church is not always open to visitors, so it is worth checking opening times before making the trip up the hill.
During construction work in 1939, workers found mosaic fragments belonging to a 1st-century necropolis beneath the floor. This means the site served as a burial ground for at least three centuries before the first church was ever raised here.
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