Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere Site Features

The apse mosaic, with its donor in it

The Coronation of the Virgin, 1130–1143, on the apse vault — with Pope Innocent II holding a model of the church. The man who paid for the rebuilding is in the picture, carrying the building you are standing in.

Cavallini's Life of the Virgin

Six mosaic scenes of 1291 by Pietro Cavallini, set below the apse vault. Late thirteenth-century, and the reason art historians come here rather than merely visitors.

The Madonna della Clemenza

In the Cappella Altemps: a panel painting in encaustic of the enthroned Virgin and Child, dated between the sixth and ninth centuries and probably Byzantine. It is one of the five oldest surviving Marian icons of the medieval period, and its nearness to the beginnings of Christianity is part of why it was believed to be a divine image rather than a made one.

The columns out of the Baths of Caracalla

Twenty-two granite shafts with Ionic and Corinthian capitals — and the door lintel. Look at the capitals: the faces of Isis, Serapis and Harpocrates were hammered off in 1870 once scholars worked out who they were.

Domenichino's ceiling

The octagonal Assumption of the Virgin of 1617, set into the coffered ceiling Domenichino designed for it.

The façade mosaic, and the campanile

A thirteenth-century Madonna and Child by Pietro Cavallini in a niche near the top of the Romanesque bell tower — the Virgin enthroned and nursing, with ten women holding lamps. Visible from the piazza, for nothing.

The Avila Chapel

Fifth on the left, by Antonio Gherardi: an oculus in the dome from which four putti emerge carrying a tempietto, lit by windows hidden from the floor. One of the most inventive chapels of late seventeenth-century Rome.

The fountain outside

Octagonal, on a map as early as 1472, restored by Carlo Fontana. The piazza is where Trastevere sits in the evening, and it costs nothing at any hour.