Some of my favourite views of Rome

2: Santa Bibiana agli Orti Liciniani

This is one of my favourite traffic light views. Below the tangle of tracks leading out of Termini station—redolent with the myriad possibilities of Palermo and Venice; of Vienna and Zürich and Naples—an unlovely underpass (to the right of this photograph) grazes the back of the little church of Santa Bibiana. Ahead is the station’s water tower designed by Angiolo Mazzoni. Mazzoni was a Rationalist architect and expediently enthusiastic Fascist who, after the end of the Second World War, spent the rest of his career in not entirely voluntary exile in Colombia.

The “Temple of Minerva Medica” seen from a train arriving at Termini from Venice. August 2021.

The church is dedicated to Santa Bibiana, St Viviana, an early martyr and virgin said to have met her end, joyfully, under the blows of scourges laden with lead during the mid-fourth century reprise of the persecution of Christians during the reign of Julian the Apostate. A church was first dedicated to her on the Esquiline Hill under Pope Simplicius in the fifth century.