Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Beneath the streets of Rome, in a network of underground galleries that extends for hundreds of kilometers through the volcanic tufa rock on which the city stands, lies one of the most important and least visited art collections in the world. The Roman catacombs — underground burial complexes used by Christians, Jews, and pagans between roughly the second and fifth centuries CE — preserve the earliest sustained body of Christian visual art in existence: frescoes painted directly on the plaster of burial chambers, carved sarcophagi, incised inscriptions, and a rich vocabulary of symbols that represent the first attempts of a new religious community to give visual form to its beliefs about death, resurrection, and the nature of the divine. The word "catacomb" itself comes from the Latin catacumbas — "near the hollows" — a name originally applied to a specific area along the Appian Way south of Rome before becoming the general term for all underground Christian buri...