SANTA CECILIA - THE PATRON SAINT OF MUSIC
written by Sergio Caggìa with Paul Gwynne for © Nerone the Insider's Guide to Rome

 

On a sunday morning of year 822 Cecilia appeared to Pope Pasquale I while he was serving in St Peter revealing the place where her body was buried. Her sepulcre was found on the same day in the Catacombs of St Calistus where, in the original wooden case of cipressus, she was. The Pope decided to build a new church for Cecilia's remains and the site chosen for its construction was the place where the house of her hausband supposed to be. Although the story of Cecilia's martyrdom was related in the Passion, which was written many centuries after her death, the veneration of the Saint aroused first among the Romans and later through the middle ages. Cecilia, descending from the noble gens Coecilia to which many senators belonged, had all the gift of beauty, grace and innocence that a girl of her age could have. She was keen on arts and had a special talent for music which she could instil with the beauty of her soul. With the help of St Urban she converted her hausband Valeriano to Christianity and lived with him in chastity. But the cruel persecution against Christians perpetrated by Emperor Marco Aurelio would have soon strike on them. Valeriano was persecuted first together with his brother Tribuzio and Maximus who supposed to attend to their martyrdom and who, instead, was converted by them.    Then came the time for Cecilia. But to kill a girl of such noble discends was not easy to do even at the times of the cruel Emperors. Avoiding then a public execution the soldiers shut Cecilia in the calidarium (sudatorium) of her bath in the house in Trastevere to suffocate her with the hot steam. Whilest three days she resisted there and sang the himns that made her the patron saint of music. When she was found still alive in the bath she was ordered to be beheaded and the sward strikes in vain three times. The Roman law forbid the fourth hit and she was left there. Cecilia survived for three more days and died on November the 22nd of 230 a.D. On this day St Cecilia is remembered non only in the her Basilica in Trastevere but also in the church of San Carlo ai Catinari where there is a chapel dedicated to her which was made by Antonio Gherardi (1700). Other historicians believe that Cecilia's martyrdom took place during the persecution of Diocletian in 303 and that St Urban, who converted Valeriano and his brother, was a bishop and not Urban I (222-230). Valerianus and Triburtius were buried in the Catacomb of St Praetextatus. Today their remains, together with Cecilia's and St Urban rests under the high altar in the church of St Cecilia in Trastevere When in 1599 under Clement VIII's reign her tomb was open, she was found in the position in which the young sculptor Stefano Maderno (1576-1636) portrayed her in 1601. In this work Maderno could express all the refined grace of Cecilia modeling the marble in a soft and luminous shape. I think he must had fall in love with her. On Cecilia's story Donatien A. Francois, Marquis de Sade, untrusted his impressions to his travel diary during his stay in Rome in 1775. This is also something worth reading!