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This article treats briefly of the individual catacomb cemeteries in the vicinity of Rome. For general information on the Roman catacombs, see ROMAN CATACOMBS. This summary account of the individual catacombs will follow the order of the great Roman roads, along which were usually located the Christian cemeteries.
The first popes were buried near the body of St. Peter, "in Vaticano" "juxta corpus beati Petri". St. Anacletus, the second successor of St. Peter raised over the body of the Apostle a memoria, or small chapel (Lib. Pontif., ed. Duchesne, I, 125). This narrow site was the burial-place of the popes to Zephyrinus (d. 217), with whom began the series of papal burials in the cemetery of St. Callistus (Barnes, The Tomb of St. Peter, London, 1900). Among the epitaphs discovered near the tomb of St. Peter are two celebrated ones, dogmatic in content, that of Livia Primitiva, now in the Louvre, and that known as the Ichthys Zonton (Fish of the Living), symbolic of the Eucharist. In the sixteenth century a marble fragment showing the word Linus was found on this site, not improbably from the epitaph of the first successor of St. Peter. The building of two basilicas, the Old St. Peter's in the fourth and the New St. Peter's in the sixteenth century, easily explains the disappearance of the early papal monuments "in Vaticano". The cemetery was probably above ground. From 258 to 260 (de Waal, Marucchi) the bodies of the Apostles reposed in the catacomb of St. Sebastian on the Via Appia, in a cubiculum or chapel (the Platonia), yet extant, whither they were taken from their original resting-places for some not sufficiently clear reason. In the fifth century members of the imperial family found a resting-place in the vicinity of the Apostle's tomb. It was long a favourite burial-place; in 689 the Saxon king, Cedwalla, was laid to rest there, "ad cujus [sc. apostolorum principis] sacratissimum corpus a finibus tenae pio ductus amore venerat', says Bede (H.E., v, 7), who has preserved the valuable metrical epitaph put up by order of Pope Sergius ending with: "Hic depositus est Caedual, qui et Petrus, rex Saxonum," etc. The "Grotte Vecchie" and the "Grotte Nuove", or subterraneous chapels and galleries in the vicinity of the tomb of St. Peter, cover the site of this ancient Christian cemetery; in them lie buried also a number of popes; St. Gregory I, Boniface VIII, Nicholas V, Alexander VI. The rich sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, important for early Christian symbolism, is in the "Grotte Nuove" [de Waal, Der Sarkophag des Junius Bassus in den Grotten von St. Petrus, Rome, 1900; Dufresne, Les Cryptes vaticanes, Rome, 1900; Dionisis (edd. Sarti and Settele), Sacrar. Vaticanae basilicae cryptarum monumenta, Rome, 1828-40]
1. Cemetery of St. Pancratius. A very youthful martyr, probably of the persecution of Diocletian. His body was never removed to a city church as were so many others, hence the cemetery remained open in the Middle Ages. Its galleries have suffered a complete devastation, last of all during the French Revolution, when the relics of the martyrs were dispersed.
2. Cemetery of Sts. Processus and Martinianus, the jailers of St. Peter in the Mamertine Prison, converted by him, and soon after his death beheaded on the Aurelian Way. The pious matron Lucina buried their bodies on her own property. The cemetery, it is believed, extends beneath the Villa Pamfili, and perhaps beyond under the Vigna Pellegrini. The accessible galleries exhibit a complete devastation, also very large loculi, an indication of remote Christian antiquity. In the fourth-century overground basilica St. Gregory preached his sermon "Ad. SS. martyrum corpora consistimus, fratres" etc. (P.L. LXXVI, 1237). Paschal I transported the bodies of the two saints to a