Santa Maria in Aracoeli
I can see why history lovers all claim S. Maria in Aracoeli to be their favorite church in Rome, and it's not because it's a church, it's previous incarnations are mind boggling.
For one, it's on Capitoline Hill, one of the primary seven hills of Rome. Capitoline Hill is in itself an extinct volcano, so there's that. By 345 BCE it was a temple to Juno Moneta, wife of Jupiter mother to Minerva, but surviving fragments suggest it may have been an older temple prior to even that. Inside the Juno Moneta temple was where the early cities coins were minted, hence the various names for 'money' in so many languages began here 'monnaie', 'monenda', 'munt', 'mint', and 'miinze'.
There is also the matter of the columns. Every single one a mismatch, each one pilfered from some other decaying Roman building probably in the Forum. That's not so unusual in this town but what is remarkable is that each heavy column had to be hoisted up this steep and treacherous hill. Up close every one has scars or chunks missing.
October 15, 1764 Edward Gibbon sat at the top of these steps gazing over the ruins of the forum he was struck with the epiphany that took him nearly 30 years to write, 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲, all 3,000 pages of it. I sit here now and though I look vaguely terrified in reality I was just trying to work out how to operate my new selfie-stick.
Then the floors. The Cosmati family of marble-cutters styled circular mosaics that took the then world by storm. I saw examples of it in Palermo, even England's King Henry III was so enamored by just the verbal description of Cosmatesque work that he styled a portion of Westminster Abbey with the work of these artists.
Lastly there's the steps, all 124 of them steep and uncomfortable, no hand rails of course, they were installed just as the Black Death was ebbing so the devout would ascend them on their knees. I climbed them upright only having to pause twice to fend off cardiac arrest. In the last picture you see an old woman scaling them with ease.
