San Sebastiano fuori le mura
basilica in Rome, Italy
San Sebastiano fuori le mura (Saint Sebastian outside the Walls), or San Sebastiano ad Catacumbas (Saint Sebastian at the Catacombs), is a minor basilica in Rome, Central Italy. Up to the Great Jubilee of 2000, San Sebastiano was one of the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome, and many pilgrims still favour the traditional list (not least perhaps because of the Catacombs and because the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, which replaced it in the list, is farther from the inner city).
The name ad catacumbas refers to the catacombs of St Sebastian, over which the church was built, while "fuori le mura" refers to the fact that the church is built outside the Aurelian Walls, and is used to differentiate the basilica from the church of San Sebastiano al Palatino on the Palatine Hill.
History
According to the founding tradition, in 258, during the Valerian persecutions, the catacombs were temporarily used as place of sepulture of two other saints martyred in Rome, Peter and Paul. Therefore the first basilica was built as the Basilica Apostolorum ("Basilica of the Apostles") by Constantine I in the first half of the 4th century. The remains of the apostles were later transferred to the two basilicas carrying their names.
St. Sebastian was a popular Roman martyr of the 3rd century whose remains were moved here in around 350. The dedication of the basilica to Sebastian dates to the 9th century.
His remains were transferred to St.
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This entry incorporates text from “San Sebastiano fuori le mura” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.