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The Santa Savinilla Catacomb in Nepi: a thousand tombs in the tuff rock and a 14th-century fresco
In Nepi (province of Viterbo), the Catacomb of Santa Savinilla is one of the most monumental Early Christian funerary areas in Lazio. Its wide galleries, carved into the tuff, house over a thousand tombs: tombe a mensa (table tombs), arcosolia (arched niches), floor-level formae (graves), and simple loculi (burial niches or recesses). It is named after the matron Savinilla who, according to a medieval document, collected the bodies of the martyred Saints Ptolemy and Romanus—traditionally said to have been killed under Claudius Gothicus—and laid them in the crypt of her estate.
Who was buried here and for how long
Oil lamps and pictorial fragments indicate that the cemetery was used from the 4th century until the first half of the 5th century. Tradition identifies one arcosolium burial as the tomb of St. Romanus, thanks to an early 14th-century fresco lining the undercroft of the arch: in the darkness of the gallery, a half-length Christ Blessing emerges, flanked by the apostles John and James the Greater.
A rare setting
Catacombs in Lazio began to appear no earlier than the end of the 3rd century. The one in Nepi is among the few in the region that remain open to visitors, preserving extensive sections of its original galleries.
