Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere site features

You do not see the church from the street. A gate in a wall opens into a quiet walled forecourt with a garden and, on the axis, a very large ancient marble basin standing alone; beyond it a portico of columns, and only then the front of the basilica with a bell tower rising behind. The effect of the approach is that the noise of Trastevere stops about four paces inside the gate.

Inside, the church is wide rather than tall, divided into three aisles, pale and evenly lit. Everything worth looking at is at one of two extremes of height, and they are at opposite ends of the room.

At the far end, low down. Beneath the high altar, at about knee height and behind a grille, lies a white marble figure roughly life-size: a young woman on her side, knees drawn slightly up, face turned away and down into the floor so you never meet it, with a cut visible at the neck. It is the single object most visitors stop in front of. Directly above it stands a canopy of white and dark marble on four slender columns, Gothic and spiky, sitting oddly over a much older altar.

At the near end, high up. Turn round and the wall you came through carries, above a gallery, a band of thirteenth-century fresco: Christ seated on a throne at the centre, with ranks of angels either side whose wings are painted in horizontal stripes of rose, green and gold — the colour is what registers first, before any of the figures. It is a fragment, cut off at both sides, and it is reached by a staircase through the convent rather than from the nave.

Below the floor, reached by steps down, are brick and stone rooms of a Roman house with patches of mosaic paving, cool and low-ceilinged, directly under the church you have just walked across.

Cavallini's Last Judgement

On the counter-facade, above the nuns' choir. Christ enthroned among ranks of angels, their wings in bands of rose, green and gold. Its own opening hours: weekdays 10.30-12.30, holidays 11.30-12.30.

Maderno's Saint Cecilia

Marble, 1600, beneath the main altar, showing the saint lying on her side in the position in which she was found. A slab in the pavement quotes Maderno's sworn statement that he recorded the body as he saw it when the tomb was opened in 1599.

Arnolfo di Cambio's ciborium

1293, black and white marble, over the altar in the presbytery.

The crypt and the excavations

Ancient Roman rooms with thermal baths and mosaics beneath the church. Open on the basilica's hours rather than the frescoes'.

The baptistery and the Roman house

Found during excavations under the Chapel of the Relics: the baptistery together with the remains of a Roman house of the early Empire.