Download The Roman Catacombs: The History and Legacy of Ancient Rome's Most Famous Burial Grounds AudioBook Free
An inexplicable draft of wind dances over the dirt floor surfaces of the small passageway, which appears to stretch on without end. The flickering flames of the torches installed onto the difficult, sandpaper-like surfaces of rock create eerie shadows on the dirt floors. One can listen to the disembodied whispers intermingling with the chill of the musty air, prompting the head of hair on many people's forearms to improve. Logically speaking, this is nothing more than the trick of the mind, but the whispers undoubtedly feel tangible and real, especially taking into consideration the visitor is in the company of thousands upon a large number of corpses stacked onto the surfaces from floor to roof. This sort of imagery is often what springs in your thoughts at the reference to the Roman catacombs, but there was so much more to these underground cemeteries. As Roman law forbade its people from burying their dead within metropolis walls, the highways of the Appian Way became dotted with, and later completely flanked by tombs of all sizes. Those from top of the echelons of culture constructed extravagant tombs and superb mausoleums for their young families and future descendants. There have been tombs and sepulchers of each form, from tumulus constellations, that have been circular mounds that rose from the bottom, to boxy temples, and clusters of small pyramids. Next to every tomb was a milestone marker with the distance to the nearest town etched on the rock slab. A few of these tombs - or what's left of these - continue to stand in their original sites today. One of the more renowned tombs was that of noblewoman Cecilia Metella, whose mausoleum was later converted to a fortress that included a massive cylindrical tower with double-winged crenellations. Another was the resting host to the Rabirii family, which is situated close to the fifth Roman mile of the Appian Way.
