San Lorenzo fuori le mura: il difficile rapporto tra strutture e testi

Abstract

In the study of ancient buildings and monuments, only on rare occasions, there is a crystal-clear relationship between the information given by texts and that found in the physical remains of the structure. A good example is the U-shaped basilica in the complex of San Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome, excavated in 1950. Usually it is identified with a basilica built in the early fourth century by Emperor Constantine, according to the sixth-century source Liber Pontificalis. Another text in the same source mentions also another basilica, built or repaired in the fifth century by Pope Sixtus III, which by some scholars have been identified with San Lorenzo fuori le mura. Other scholars have preferred to see this fifth-century basilica in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, but this paper stresses that recent research in other fields makes this identification is impossible, concluding, for this and other reasons, that the basilica of Sixtus III probably is San Lorenzo fuori le mura but that this Pope perhaps only repaired the church, which probably was built by Constantine.