The Catacombs

Saturday afternoon we took an additional tour to the Catacombs and St Paul's Basilica.  We were not really familiar with the Catacombs until the tour, but they are actually cemeteries.  In ancient Rome they did not allow burials of the dead inside the walls surrounding the city, primarily for health reasons.  So all burial sites had to be outside the walls.  The terrain surrounding Rome is actually soft volcanic rock beneath the surface soil.  So they dug graves out of the soft volcanic rock, spaced along underground tunnels.  The graves were dug horizontally in the walls along the tunnel corridors.  The tunnels are tall enough I could stand and walk in them. 

The demand for burial graves was so large that gravediggers were a specific skill and "career", and they were able to dig down to multiple levels of graves with stairs dug out between the levels.  At the particular site we visited there were 4 usable levels, and a fifth level was started but not stable enough to use.

When families wanted to be buried together, and when they had the wealth to do so, entire rooms would be dug out of the tunnel corridors with graves then dug in the walls around the room.  

The tour included walking down to level one and around a small area.  It was interesting to see how small so many of the graves were dug.  The tour guide explained that many of the graves were for children because the mortality rate among children was vey high.

I have no photos of the Catacombs because they allow no photography.  So you can read more about them here.