Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura site features

San Lorenzo fuori le Mura is a long, low, brick basilica standing behind a columned porch at the end of a wide open square, a short walk outside the ancient walls on the Via Tiburtina, with the gate of the Verano cemetery immediately beside it.

The front is a porch, not a facade. Six columns of spoil — ancient shafts of different stones, reused — carry a trabeation with a rich polychrome frieze of inlaid marble and glass, in red, green and gold. Behind it the brick facade rises plainly, pierced by three arched windows. Set back on the right stands the Romanesque brick campanile of the 12th century, square, with open arcaded stages near the top.

Under the porch the walls are painted and populated. Frescoes of the end of the thirteenth century run along them with Stories of Saints Lawrence and Stephen and of Count Henry, and two lions sit either side of the entrance portal, with two carved sarcophagi against the right-hand wall.

Inside, the first thing you notice is that the room is not straight. The interior runs in three naves divided by twenty-two columns different in size and in marble, and the two churches that make up the building are adjacent but not perfectly in axis, so the far end sits slightly off the line your eye expects.

The floor is inlaid and the furniture is medieval. Pavement, ambones and paschal candelabrum are cosmatesque of the end of the 13th century — white marble set with small discs and ribbons of red and green porphyry.

The far end rises. Two small staircases climb to the presbytery, framed by pavonazzetto columns under a magnificent 4th-century entablature with trophies of arms and vegetal motifs. At its centre the ciborium of 1148 stands on four porphyry shafts under a pyramid; behind it the episcopal throne of 1254, in mosaic and polychrome marble; and above, on the triumphal arch, the gold-ground mosaic of the end of the 6th century.

The two misaligned basilicas

The Pelagian church adapted as presbytery and the Honorian one, adjacent but not perfectly in axis.

The ciborium of 1148

The oldest work signed by Roman marble-workers: four porphyry shafts supporting a pyramidal covering on small trabeated columns.

The apse mosaic

Of the end of the 6th century: Christ among Saints Paul, Stephen, Hippolytus, Peter, Lawrence and Pope Pelagius, the pope offering Christ the model of the basilica minor.

The Vassalletto portico

Around 1220, on six columns of spoil, with a rich polychrome frieze and frescoes of the end of the thirteenth century.

The cosmatesque work

Pavement, ambones and paschal candelabrum, end of the 13th century.

The episcopal throne

1254, decorated with mosaics and polychrome marbles.

The chapel of San Tarcisio

Nineteenth-century, by Vespignani, with a Beheading of the Baptist by the Caravaggesque Giovanni Serodine (1619).

The chapel of Santa Ciriaca

Baroque in taste, with funerary monuments designed by Pietro da Cortona.

The tomb of Cardinal Enrico Fieschi

On the counter-facade: an early Christian sarcophagus with a wedding scene, under a baldachin.

The chapel of Pius IX

Erected at the end of the 19th century reusing the narthex of the Pelagian basilica.

The campanile

Romanesque, in brick, of the 12th century.