Basilica of Santa Cristina historical timeline

Sixteen centuries of building here have one organising point: a grave. The Christian cemetery outside Roman Volsinii was in use from the end of the third century, Christina's remains were brought into it around the middle of the fourth, and everything above ground grew outward from that tomb -- and, after 1263, from the Eucharistic Miracle that happened on an altar beside it. A visitor today walks down through the result: a Renaissance façade, a stripped medieval nave, a Baroque chapel, and then the catacomb with the altar in its Renaissance enclosure and, lower again, a holed sarcophagus with a Roman urn inside it.

Chronology

1. 264 B.C. Rome destroys Etruscan Velzna, on the site of present Orvieto, and settles the survivors down the valley as Volsinii. Its position on the Cassia Vetus, and later the Traiana Nova, is what makes it grow -- and the catacomb lies beside what is almost certainly that road, 350 m south of the city limit.
2. late 200s The cemetery of Bolsena's first Christian community comes into use, in ground that had served as a necropolis long before. It stays in use until the first twenty years of the fifth century, and it is the catacomb a visitor enters today.
3. 313 A bishop of the city attends the Lateran Synod, which is where Lanzoni places the start of the Volsinian episcopate; the earliest documentary notice of it otherwise dates to 494-95. The forum on Poggio Moscini records upheaval across these decades, and the civil basilica there is converted to Christian worship.
4. c. 350 Christina's remains are translated into the cemetery, where many were already buried, and a small monumental memoria rises over the grave at once. That memoria is the core of the underground basilica still standing.
5. early 400s The earliest surviving redaction of her legend is written: the eleven-year-old daughter of Urbanus, a magistrate who becomes her persecutor; her father dies seeing her rise from the lake he had her thrown into with a millstone round her neck; Dio succeeds him and is killed by a splinter of Apollo's statue; Julian finishes the work, and on 24 July her heart stops, pierced by arrows. The 24th is still the feast day.
6. 500s Her image appears in the Ravenna mosaics of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, among the most venerated virgins of the West. In the same century the population leaves the Roman site for two new nuclei, one of them on the Poggio di Santa Croce directly above the basilica.
7. 831-842 Relics of Saints Valentine, Hilary and Christina are translated to the abbey of Farfa under abbot Sicardo, from a sanctuary necropolis on the Cassia within the monastery's jurisdiction -- possibly this one.
8. ante 860 Ado, archbishop of Vienne, places Christina's birth, martyrdom and burial on the shores of Lake Bolsena in his Martyrology, and a bull of Leo IV names two churches dedicated to her, of which the one at Bolsena is the more celebrated.
9. 900s The memoria over the tomb is enlarged into the small underground basilica now called the Grotta di Santa Cristina. A silver coin of King Berengar from the first half of this century was later found inside the urn in the tomb.
10. 990-994 Sigeric's itinerary lists Santa Cristina as a stage on the Via Cassia between Acquapendente and Montefiascone. Pilgrim guides from here on often call both the town and the lake by the saint's name; the Via Francigena still passes the door.
11. 1078 Gregory VII consecrates the three-naved church on 10 May, by local tradition, which also credits its building to the devotion of Matilda of Canossa. The eleventh-century date for the present structure is reasonably firm whatever the names; trial trenches under the right nave in 1925 found marble column bases and sarcophagi from an earlier, perhaps paleochristian, building.
12. 1157 Adrian IV buys two mills near the church -- a papacy taking an interest in the property forty years after an Orvieto document of 1115 records Count Bernardo donating the church to the bishop of the Umbrian city.
13. 1263 A Teutonic priest troubled by doubts about the real presence says mass at the martyr's tomb, and the host bleeds onto the corporal. The altar it happened on survives in the catacomb, inside a Renaissance enclosure; the relics went to Orvieto cathedral and are still there.
14. 1264 Urban IV institutes Corpus Domini by the bull Transiturus de hoc mundo -- 11 August for the patriarchate of Jerusalem, 8 September for the universal Church -- fixes it on the Thursday after the octave of Pentecost, and commissions Thomas Aquinas to write the office and the mass.
15. 1493-1495 The Community of Bolsena and Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici pay for a new façade: 400 florins from the Community in 1493, Francesco Buglioni accepted on 27 July in place of his brother Benedetto, who was the real author of the model, and Benedetto contracted on 27 October 1494 for the upper part and its terracottas. He stays until the end of 1497, and makes the statue of Santa Cristina in the sleep of death for the tomb in the same years.
16. 1637 The façade loses its original polychromy. What a visitor sees now is the architecture without the colour it was designed with.
17. 1693 The Cappella Nuova del Miracolo is begun, between the catacomb and the medieval church. Tommaso Mattei designs its front at the end of the century; Virginio Vespignani only completes it in 1863.
18. 1880 Christina's tomb is found, in a campaign under Giovanni Battista de Rossi and Enrico Stevenson. The travertine balustrade and double stair go in at the end of the century to monumentalise the area around it, and the modern crypt holding the sarcophagus is built afterwards.
19. 1925-1930 A restoration under the architect Gavini and the superintendent Carlo Pieri destroys all the late-Baroque superstructures in search of the original forms, demolishing and rebuilding arbitrarily. The bare nave a visitor walks into is its result.

Survival and restoration

The losses here are documented by the people who own the building, which is unusual. The sanctuary's own history records that the 1925-1930 campaign went looking for the original church and destroyed every late-Baroque layer to find it, demolishing and rebuilding arbitrarily, and that many elements of fundamental importance to the building's history went with them. It names the architect and the superintendent. The 1637 loss of the façade's polychromy is set down the same way.

The tomb survived by being forgotten and then being robbed badly. The sarcophagus in the crypt has a wide hole punched in its back by people after the contents; what they missed was the Roman cinerary urn inside, which still held most of the small bones of a body under fourteen and the Berengar coin. The grave was not recovered archaeologically until the summer of 1880.

What is intact is the underground work, because nobody modernised it. The fourth-century memoria is inside a tenth-century basilichetta; its barrel vault carries frescoes probably of the sixteenth century and a Saint Peter from the second half of the fifteenth; Buglioni's terracotta of the martyr asleep in death, made between 1493 and 1497, is still at the tomb it was made for. Photography is forbidden throughout, by a permit regime run from the Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, which is one reason it stays in that condition.

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