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Rome

Also Known As Roman
Italy

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Rome grew from a cluster of hilltop villages into the capital of an empire whose state religion, built on Jupiter and the Capitoline Triad, gave way over four centuries to Christianity, and it has served as the seat of the Roman Catholic Church, the world's largest single Christian body, ever since. Its churches stand on top of temples that stood on top of tombs, and its catacombs still hold the bones of the martyrs its own emperors once put to death.

Facts
Status
UNESCO World Heritage
Inscribed on the World Heritage List 1
The Historic Centre of Rome, the Properties of the Holy See in that City Enjoying Extraterritorial Rights and San Paolo Fuori le Mura was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1980, jointly listed by Italy and the Holy See
Origins
Founded
Legendary founding by Romulus in 753 BCE on the Palatine Hill; archaeologically, Iron Age hilltop villages merged into a single city by the sixth century BCE 1
Attributions
Tradition
Ancient Roman state religion, centered on the Capitoline Triad, succeeded from the fourth century CE onward by Roman Catholic Christianity 1
Site
Pilgrimage
Major pilgrimage destination today 2
A major Roman Catholic pilgrimage destination, drawn to Saint Peter's Basilica, the catacombs and the pope's public audiences
Traditions
Sacred and Liturgical Languages
Latin remains the official language of the Holy See and Vatican City; Italian is the language of daily worship in the city's parishes 1
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From Romulus to the Pontifex Maximus

Roman tradition dated the city's founding to 753 BCE, when Romulus was said to have drawn its sacred boundary, the pomerium, on the Palatine Hill after killing his twin brother Remus in a dispute over the site, a story Romans themselves treated as legend rather than history. What is certain archaeologically is that Iron Age villages on the Palatine and neighboring hills merged into a single city by the sixth century BCE, ruled first by kings and then, from 509 BCE, by a Republic whose magistrates held priestly office as a matter of course. The Capitoline Triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, worshipped together in a great temple on the Capitoline Hill, stood at the center of that state religion, and the college of pontiffs, headed by the Pontifex Maximus, regulated the calendar and the ritual on which Rome's relationship with its gods depended.

As Rome's power grew from city-state to empire, so did its pantheon, absorbing the gods of conquered peoples and, from the first century CE onward, hosting foreign cults, Egyptian Isis, Persian-derived Mithras and eventually Christianity. Successive emperors, most severely Nero, Decius and Diocletian, persecuted Christians as a threat to the state cult that guaranteed Rome's prosperity, executions Roman tradition later located at identifiable sites in the city. Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 CE ended that persecution, and by the century's end Christianity had displaced the old state religion entirely, leaving the title Pontifex Maximus, once held by the emperor, to pass by tradition into the vocabulary of the papacy. Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price's Religions of Rome remains the standard modern account of that civic religion's rise and eclipse.

A City Built on Its Own Martyrs

Christian tradition holds that both Peter and Paul were executed in Rome under Nero in the 60s CE, Peter by crucifixion near a circus on the Vatican Hill and Paul by beheading on the road to Ostia, and it is on the strength of that tradition, not administrative convenience, that Rome rather than Jerusalem or Antioch became the seat of the bishop who claims Peter's spiritual succession. Excavations beneath Saint Peter's Basilica in the twentieth century uncovered a Roman-era necropolis and a shrine that at least matches the traditional site of Peter's burial, though the identification of specific bones as his remains a matter of continuing scholarly caution rather than settled proof.

Beneath and around the city, Christians of the second through fourth centuries dug an extensive network of catacombs, underground galleries used for burial rather than, as popular legend later held, for hiding from persecution, and decorated with some of the earliest surviving Christian art. Once Christianity became the empire's favored and then established religion, Rome's bishops built basilicas over the traditional burial sites of the city's martyrs, and pilgrims have traveled to venerate those sites, and to receive the pope's blessing, in unbroken practice for over a millennium and a half. The city that once fed Christians to its arena now governs, from the same ground, the largest single Christian body in the world, and its catacombs and basilicas remain active pilgrimage sites rather than museum pieces.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Rome directly: "at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, finding a calibrated two sigma range of AD 980 to 1146, a clearly medieval date rather than a first century one."

Source 14C Dating of the Titulus CrucisFrancesco Bella and Carlo Azzi

This source names Rome directly: "had Alexandria prevailed over Rome, he writes, the "extravagant and muddled stories" he has summarized would read as "coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary." Published in English translation..."

Source Vindicacion del Falso Basilides, Una (Borges Center)Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh

This source names Rome directly: "Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, The History of Rome, Books 21 to 30, covering the Second Punic War, is the Roman historian's own primary narrative account, written more than a century and a half after the..."

Aeneid, Sources

This source names Rome directly: "to found the people who would become Rome, deliberately written to connect Roman religious and civic identity, including the imperial cult later built around Augustus, to a divinely sanctioned..."

Source AeneidVirgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)

This source names Rome directly: "dioceses around the world report to Rome each year, chiefly counts of baptisms, clergy, parishes and other institutional measures."

Source Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2023Central Office of Church Statistics, Secretariat of Statethe holders' own account

This source names Rome directly: "astrologers of Hellenistic Egypt and Rome, the medieval and early modern astrologer-physicians, and the founders of palmistry, cartomancy and numerology whose systems still structure divinatory..."

This source names Rome directly: "Astrological Melothesia in Ancient Rome and India, Tejas Aralere's 2023 dissertation in Classics, co-advised across Classics and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara..."

This source names Rome directly: "the great public priestly colleges of Rome, whose office was to read the auspices, principally the flight and behaviour of birds, to determine whether the gods sanctioned a proposed public action..."

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

This source names Rome directly: "returns from campaigning against Rome to face Mordred's usurpation, and the two armies meet at a river called Camblam in Geoffrey's Latin, where Mordred is killed and Arthur is mortally wounded and..."

Source The New Arthurian EncyclopediaNorris J. Lacy (ed.)

This source names Rome directly: "feast its English name was added in Rome by around the seventh century."

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Capitoline Hill held the great temple of the Capitoline Triad, Rome's central state cult.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price
Catharism, Religions

This source names Rome directly: "ascetic elite known as the perfecti. Rome judged the movement a mortal threat to Latin Christendom and answered it first with preaching missions, then in 1209 with the Albigensian Crusade, and..."

Source The Cathars (Lambert, Blackwell, 1998)Malcolm Lambert

This source names Rome directly: "simultaneously at a public ceremony in Rome and at the Phanar in Istanbul, and that the lifting did not by itself restore full communion between the two churches."

This source names Rome directly: "to scapegoat it for the Great Fire of Rome, an episode the Roman historian Tacitus records directly."

Source Tacitus, Annals, Book XVPublius Cornelius Tacitus

This source names Rome directly: "the temple officials of pre-Christian Rome and the high priesthood of Zoroastrian Iran, since holding a religious office is the common thread rather than any one tradition."

This source names Rome directly: "from the controversy that was heard at Rome and closed without either side being condemned."

This source names Rome directly: "Conservation of Works of Art, held in Rome in 1930."

This source names Rome directly: "modelled on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, drawing a deliberate visual line between imperial and papal authority."

Source Vatican Museums, official collection page, "Consegna delle Chiavi" (Perugino)Vatican Museums, official collection entry

This source names Rome directly: "Johannes Ronge's public break with Rome."

Source Der Heilige Rock zu Trier: Studien zur Geschichte und Verehrung der Tunika ChristiErich Aretz, Michael Embach, Michael Persch, Franz Ronig (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "sect at a time of open war between Rome and Persia, a suspicion of foreign loyalty layered on top of the same charge of heresy that had already ended Mani's life at home."

This source names Rome directly: "Once Rome adopted the December date, the West gave the January date a distinct meaning, the visit of the Magi to the infant Christ."

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
Epona, Deities

Epona's cult, carried above all by Roman cavalry, spread across the empire from Gaul to the Danube and to Rome itself.

Source Celtic Culture: A Historical EncyclopediaJohn T. Koch (ed.)

This source names Rome directly: "a corpse, or spend a night away from Rome."

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

This source names Rome directly: "Flavius Josephus Between Jerusalem and Rome, His Life, His Works, and Their Importance, published by JSOT Press in 1988, is a scholarly study of the first century Jewish historian Josephus..."

This source names Rome directly: "Gregorio Allegri, born in 1582 in Rome and died there on February 7, 1652, was an Italian priest, singer and composer of the late Roman school of sacred polyphony."

Source Composer Biographies (Britannica, Wikipedia and Publisher Program Notes, Compiled 2026)Compiled from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and publisher concert-program notes
Herodium, Sacred Sites

This source names Rome directly: "both the First Jewish Revolt against Rome and the Bar Kokhba revolt roughly sixty years afterward, when defenders cut tunnels through the hill itself to move troops and supplies unseen."

Source The Jewish WarFlavius Josephus

This source names Rome directly: "on the imperial cult of ancient Rome, consulted 2026-08-11."

Source Imperial Cult of Ancient Rome (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Rome directly: "for the pilgrims and travelers to Rome for whom an image of the basilica's overwhelming interior was an obligatory souvenir."

Source The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Interior of Saint Peter's, Rome," accession 71.31The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue entry

This source names Rome directly: "channel that began transmitting from Rome on October 21, 1998 with the moral and financial backing of Saudi businessman Saleh Abdullah Kamel and under founding director general Abdul Qader Tash."

Source Iqraa (Wikipedia)
Janus, Deities

Janus's temple, the Ianus Geminus in the Roman Forum, stood open in time of war and was ceremonially closed only in the rare times Rome was fully at peace.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Rome directly: "of the Second Vatican Council in Rome and at a special ceremony in Istanbul, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I issued this joint declaration removing the sentences of mutual..."

Source Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras IPope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras Ithe holders' own account

Italian troops breached the wall at Porta Pia on 20 September 1870, ending eleven centuries of papal temporal rule in Rome.

Lares, Deities
Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "old clinical name for lead poisoning. Rome ran on it: plumbum gives both the symbol Pb and the word plumber, and lead pipes, lead cooking vessels and lead-sweetened wine were all standard."

This source names Rome directly: "edition from CLV Edizioni Liturgiche, Rome, presents the oldest surviving complete Byzantine euchologion, or liturgical service book, manuscript."

Source L'Eucologio Barberini gr. 336Stefano Parenti and Elena Velkovska (editors)

This source names Rome directly: "Clairvaux in 1148 while travelling to Rome, and Bernard wrote his hagiography shortly afterward."

Mars, Deities

Mars, father of Romulus in Roman legend, was closely tied to the city's founding myth.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

This source names Rome directly: "through the decisive break with Rome."

This source names Rome directly: "restored England's relationship with Rome, reversing the settlement Henry VIII had begun."

Source Marian Persecutions (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

The endpoint of Paul's final voyage and the seat of the western church that followed

This source names Rome directly: "of a basilica to Michael outside Rome in the fifth or sixth century."

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "Fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, visiting Rome with his father in 1770, heard it performed once, wrote it out entirely from memory afterward, returned to correct his transcription against..."

Source Miserere mei, Deus (Allegri) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Mordred, Figures

This source names Rome directly: "Arthur is away campaigning against Rome, forcing Arthur to return and fight the usurper at Camlann, where both men die of wounds dealt to each other."

Source The New Arthurian EncyclopediaNorris J. Lacy (ed.)

This source names Rome directly: "the first century BCE, chiefly in Rome and Alexandria, reviving the older Pythagorean interest in number as the key to reality and the soul's journey through successive bodies, and combining it with..."

Source Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyEdward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "was chief Vestal (Vestalis Maxima) at Rome for fifty-seven years, presiding over the perpetual sacred fire of Vesta with, in the Roman historian Tacitus's own words, unblemished purity, until her..."

This source names Rome directly: "prelature, the current prelate, the Rome headquarters address, the 2025 membership figure, the 2022 Ad Charisma Tuendum reform, and the general shape of documented criticism of the prelature's..."

Source Opus Dei (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Tradition holds Paul was martyred in Rome under Nero.

Source The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, InscriptionsVincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni
Penates, Deities
Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "traditions such as Compostela or Rome need a separate source with that focus."

Source Pilgrimage in Medieval EnglandDiana Webb

This source names Rome directly: "Greek religion, Virgil and Ovid for Rome, Dante for medieval Christendom."

This source names Rome directly: "published 10 March 2019, on the Rome Italy Temple dedication, confirming President Nelson's 9 March 2019 meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican the day before, the first meeting in history between..."

This source names Rome directly: "decades after Italian unification took Rome from the papacy in 1870, when successive popes refused to recognise the new Italian state and periodic secret plots aimed to restore papal temporal power."

This source names Rome directly: "criminal responsibility under the Rome Statute, not a work of religious studies or history describing the shrines' significance or the broader Sufi tradition they belonged to, so it is the right..."

Source Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, Judgment and Sentence, ICC-01/12-01/15International Criminal Court, Trial Chamber VIII

This source names Rome directly: "imperial cult's different character in Rome itself or in other provinces needs a source addressing that different region."

Rome held the state cults, the pontifical colleges and, after the empire turned, the see whose bishop claimed primacy over the western church.

This source names Rome directly: "and for escalating tensions between Rome and its Jewish population that erupted into the First Jewish-Roman War of 66 to 73 CE, ending in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE."

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "on the 10 March 2019 dedication of the Rome Italy Temple by President Russell M."

This source names Rome directly: "of Latter-day Saints dedicated the Rome Italy Temple, the first of three sessions held that day out of seven held over three days, 10 to 12 March 2019."

Sabazios, Deities

This source names Rome directly: "through the Greek world and into Rome, absorbed so thoroughly into the religious landscape it entered that Greco-Roman writers routinely interpreted him as a form of Zeus or, more commonly, merged..."

Saint Peter's Basilica stands over the traditional burial site of Peter and is the center of the Vatican.

Source The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, InscriptionsVincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni

This source names Rome directly: "centuries as a major power alongside Rome and Byzantium, and its eventual fall to the early Islamic conquests."

The expiatory rites were performed at Rome, and the Magna Mater was installed on the Palatine with games founded in her honour.

This source names Rome directly: "tablets, defixiones, recovered from Rome and associated with the so called Sethian magical tradition, including tablets invoking chariot racing curses at the circus."

Source Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus RomRichard Wunsch
Simon Peter, Figures

Tradition holds Peter was martyred in Rome and is buried beneath Saint Peter's Basilica.

Source The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, InscriptionsVincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni

This source names Rome directly: "and Chrysippus, then took root at Rome, where Seneca, Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius gave it its most widely read literary form before its distinct institutional life faded in late..."

This source names Rome directly: "order long attributed to Hippolytus of Rome as a single early third century author is in fact a layered composite text from multiple periods and hands."

Source The Apostolic Tradition: A CommentaryPaul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips

This source names Rome directly: "beside the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome."

This source names Rome directly: "The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars, T."

The Catacombs of Rome hold the burials and earliest art of the city's Christian community.

Source The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, InscriptionsVincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni

This source names Rome directly: "specializing in early Christian Rome, and this Schnell und Steiner volume is their scholarly survey of the history, decoration and inscriptions of the Roman catacombs."

Source The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, InscriptionsVincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni

This source names Rome directly: "the faith politically associated with Rome, and the worst persecution came under Shapur II in the fourth century."

This source names Rome directly: "Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, one depicting the conversion of Saint Paul and the other the crucifixion of Saint Peter, for a fee of 400 scudi."

Source Wikipedia, "Conversion on the Way to Damascus"Wikipedia contributors

This source names Rome directly: "the Pontificio Istituto Orientale in Rome in 1995 as volume 6 of its Kanonika series, is an edited scholarly volume presenting the proceedings of a 1992 symposium reassessing the seventh century..."

Source The Council in Trullo RevisitedGeorge Nedungatt and Michael Featherstone (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "and neighborhood religion in ancient Rome, focusing on the Lares, guardian spirits of the household and crossroads, and on garden serpent cults, forms of everyday Roman religious practice that..."

This source names Rome directly: ""Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary." Used here for the essay's own closing..."

This source names Rome directly: "against Christianity under pagan Rome."

This source names Rome directly: "is a Roman Catholic institution in Rome for the study of the Christian East, so a claim about how a specific Orthodox church understands its own identity independently of communion with Rome may..."

Source The Eastern Christian Churches: A Brief SurveyRonald G. Roberson

Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, ending the persecution of Christians across the empire, in 313 CE.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

This source names Rome directly: "head of the church in England, after Rome refused to annul his marriage."

Source Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700Diarmaid MacCulloch

This source names Rome directly: "Roman tradition dated the founding of Rome to 753 BCE, fixed by the scholar Varro from the legendary contest between the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, raised by a she-wolf after being abandoned..."

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "King at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome in September 2012, containing a broken line that King translated as including the words Jesus said to them, my wife."

This source names Rome directly: "Sigeric's pilgrimage route home from Rome and is the earliest detailed record of what became the Via Francigena pilgrim road."

This source names Rome directly: "account of the Jewish revolt against Rome and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, written by a former rebel commander who surrendered to and later served under the Roman general Vespasian."

Source The Jewish WarFlavius Josephus

This source names Rome directly: "the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in Rome, in which the golden table and the menorah of the Temple were carried through the city in the victory procession."

Source The Jewish War (Bellum Judaicum), Book VIIFlavius Josephus (trans. H. St. J. Thackeray, Loeb Classical Library)

This source names Rome directly: "its origins, its relationship with Rome and its place within the wider Syriac Christian tradition, written to address what Moosa identified as a Maronite crisis of identity in the modern Lebanese..."

Source The Maronites in HistoryMatti Moosa

This source names Rome directly: "at Masada, a heroic last stand against Rome, was shaped and popularized in the twentieth century in ways that outrun what Josephus's own ancient account and the archaeological record actually support."

The Pantheon, built as a temple to all the gods, has served as a Christian church since the seventh century.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

This source names Rome directly: "maintained by the church's rectory in Rome and published on its own website, for the relics of the Passion the basilica holds, a collection traditionally associated with Helena, mother of the..."

This source names Rome directly: "in which pilgrims to the basilicas of Rome may receive a plenary indulgence."

This source names Rome directly: "Martin Luther's own break with Rome by roughly sixty years."

Source Moravian Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Rome directly: "hunted underground in both Persia and Rome an entire steppe empire as its patron and turning Manichaean temples and clergy into a recognized part of Uyghur state life."

Vadstena, Cities

This source names Rome directly: "Bridget herself never saw the abbey completed, dying in Rome in 1373 before returning to Sweden, but her daughter Catherine oversaw the community's founding and Bridget's own remains were brought..."

Source The Catholic EncyclopediaCharles George Herbermann et al. (eds.)

This source names Rome directly: "Armenian Church in roughly the way Rome functions for Roman Catholicism."

Source The Armenian People From Ancient to Modern TimesRichard G. Hovannisian (ed.)

This source names Rome directly: "teacher Valentinus, who taught in Rome and Alexandria and was, by some ancient accounts, briefly a candidate for the Roman bishopric."

Source The Gnostic GospelsElaine Pagels

Contained In

Italy, Countries

Rome is the capital of modern Italy, and Vatican City, a separate sovereign state, lies within it.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Sacred To

Rome has been the seat of the Roman Catholic Church since the early centuries of Christianity.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price
Jupiter, Deities

Jupiter, head of the Capitoline Triad, was worshipped at Rome's central state temple.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Rome was the seat of Roman state religion, centered on the Capitoline Triad.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price
Sources
1. Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History
Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source
2. The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions
Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni, Schnell und Steiner, 2002View the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
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