Temple, Friars and Jesuits: Six Churches from the Capitoline to the Pantheon

Rome's churches are easier to understand as a sequence than as a list. Each period of the city's religious history built in its own way: on top of ancient temples, with columns taken from pagan buildings, in the Gothic of the preaching friars, and then in the confident Baroque of the Counter-Reformation.

This walk covers that sequence in a small area between the Capitoline Hill and the Pantheon. It is ordered by the streets, not by date, so the story jumps: it starts in the Middle Ages, moves to the Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, returns to the Dominicans, and then goes back to the Roman Empire before ending with Caravaggio. All six are working churches, so expect services, and parts of a building closed while they take place.

Santa Maria in Aracoeli stands on the hill that was the religious centre of ancient Rome, and it is still the designated church of the city council. An abbey is recorded here in 574. The site passed to the Benedictines and then, by a papal bull of 1249–1250, to the Franciscans, who made it their Roman headquarters.

The stairway of 124 steps in front was designed in 1348, at the time of the Black Death. Inside, look at the nave columns: they were taken from ancient monuments, and no two are alike. A twelfth-century guide to the city claimed that the Tiburtine Sibyl foretold the coming of Christ to Augustus on this spot, and the two figures are shown beside the arch above the high altar. The first chapel on the right has Pinturicchio's frescoes of the life of Saint Bernardino of Siena. The gilded ceiling, finished in 1575, gives thanks for the victory at Lepanto.

The Chiesa del Gesù is the mother church of the Society of Jesus. Building began in 1568 to a design by Vignola, paid for by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and the church was consecrated in 1584. Giacomo della Porta revised the façade.

Its plan mattered more than its decoration. There is one wide nave with no aisles, chapels opening off it, and short transepts, so that a large congregation can see the altar and hear the preacher. Jesuit churches across the world followed this pattern for centuries. The decoration came a century later: Giovanni Battista Gaulli painted the Triumph of the Name of Jesus on the nave vault in 1678–1679, with figures that appear to spill out of the frame. Saint Ignatius of Loyola is buried in the chapel in the left transept, designed by Andrea Pozzo between 1696 and 1700.

After Ignatius was made a saint in 1622, Pope Gregory XV suggested a church in his honour to his nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. Sant'Ignazio was built between 1626 and 1650 as the chapel of the Roman College, the Jesuit school next door, to plans by Orazio Grassi, a Jesuit mathematician who taught there.

The reason to come is Andrea Pozzo, a Jesuit lay brother and the same artist who designed the saint's chapel at the Gesù. Around 1685 he painted the nave ceiling with Ignatius being received into paradise, surrounded by figures for the four continents. A marble disc in the floor marks the point from which the painted architecture lines up with the real walls. There was no money for a dome, so Pozzo painted one on canvas over the crossing. The original burned, and the canvas there now is a copy of 1823.

The name of Santa Maria sopra Minerva means "Saint Mary above Minerva", but the ruins under the first church belonged to a temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis that was wrongly taken for Minerva's. The Dominicans began the present building in 1280 on the model of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and it is the only original Gothic church surviving in Rome. Much of what you see on the walls and vaults is nineteenth-century: a restoration between 1848 and 1855 removed Baroque additions and added neo-Gothic painting.

Saint Catherine of Siena lies beneath the high altar, without her head, which is kept in Siena. The painter Fra Angelico, who died in the convent next door, is buried here too. To the left of the altar is Michelangelo's marble Christ the Redeemer, and the Carafa Chapel has frescoes painted by Filippino Lippi in 1488–1493. In that same convent, on 22 June 1633, Galileo renounced his teaching that the Earth moves. The elephant carrying an obelisk in the square was designed by Bernini and carved in 1667.

The Pantheon carries the name of Marcus Agrippa on its front, but his temple, built under Augustus, was destroyed. The present building was completed under Hadrian and probably dedicated around AD 126, with the old inscription repeated. Its dome is still the largest in the world made of unreinforced concrete. The height to the opening at the top, the oculus, and the width of the interior are the same: 43 metres.

It survives because of what happened in 609, when the Byzantine emperor Phocas gave it to Pope Boniface IV, who consecrated it as the church of Saint Mary and the Martyrs. Mass is still celebrated here on Sundays and holy days. The building's later losses were also Christian work: Pope Urban VIII had the bronze trusses of the portico melted down, most of it for cannon. Raphael is buried inside, as are two kings of Italy.

San Luigi dei Francesi is the national church of France in Rome, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Saint Denis and King Louis IX. Cardinal Giulio de' Medici commissioned it in 1518, work stopped when Rome was sacked in 1527, and it was finished and consecrated in 1589. Giacomo della Porta, whom you met at the Gesù, designed the façade.

Most visitors walk straight to the Contarelli Chapel, where three canvases by Caravaggio tell the life of Saint Matthew, a cycle dated 1599–1600: the Calling on the left wall, the Inspiration above the altar and the Martyrdom on the right. They are still in the chapel they were painted for. Give some time also to Domenichino's frescoes of Saint Cecilia in another chapel.

None of these churches was built on empty ground or left as it was built. The Franciscans raised their nave on columns from pagan monuments, the Dominicans built over a temple of Isis, and a pope turned a temple of all the gods into a church and so preserved it. The Jesuits then changed what a church was for, and painters such as Gaulli, Pozzo and Caravaggio changed what one could show. Seen in a single walk, the six make the case that Rome's religious history is a history of reuse.