Vignola Mattei Complex (formerly Church of Santa Maria in Tempulo)

Owned by the municipality of Rome, this simple and enchanting small building on the slopes of the Caelian is a deconsecrated church where civil weddings are now celebrated. Its history goes back a long way, suffice it to say that the street where it stands, via Valle delle Camene, retraces the initial route of the ancient Appian Way and recalls in its name the ancient spring sacred to the Camenae nymphs, from which the Vestal Virgins drew water for their rites.

A small oratory dedicated to St. Agatha was built on this site by a Greek religious community probably as early as the late 6th century. At the beginning of the 9th century, the church was connected to a “monasterium Tempuli” which hosted a highly venerated icon of Our Lady that, according to one of the legends, had been donated by a man named  Tempulus. However, it is more likely that the appellation Tempulus derives from the church’s proximity to a Roman temple (a templum). What is certain is that the church with its present dedication and the adjoining monastery of Benedictine nuns are first mentioned unambiguously in 1155: the remains of a campanile that are now encompassed in the outer masonry date to this period.

Less than a century later, however, the church would be abandoned. When St. Dominic was asked to found the first cloistered female monastic order, he chose the nuns of Santa Maria in Tempulo (called the Tempulines) and in 1222 had them moved to the nearby monastery of San Sisto Vecchio and the icon went with them. The icon is now in the church of Santa Maria del Rosario a Monte Mario. The complex then became a private house until, in the 17th century, it was incorporated into the Villa Celimontana estate (then owned by the Mattei family) and transformed presumably into a nymphaeum. Described as a barn in Nolli’s 18th-century plans, the building was saved from destruction when the archaeological promenade of Porta Capena Park was created in the early 20th century and then given for free use until the 1980s to artists such as sculptors Michele La Spina, Francesco Sansone and Ugo Quaglieri.