Ipogeo di Vibia

Underground cemetery, located inside the 17th-century Villa Casali, on the left side of the Via Appia Antica. It consists of eight separate hypogea excavated at different heights, datable between the 3rd and the beginning of the 5th century AD.
It takes its name from Vibia, who was buried here with her husband Vincenzo.

The catacomb, and in particular the hypogeum that gives it its name, was discovered for the first time by the archaeologist Giovanni Gaetano Bottari in the Casale della Torretta estate on the Appian Way; he published the paintings of the arcosolia in his work Sculture e pitture sagre estratto dai cemiteri di Roma of 1754: these paintings had the characteristic of alluding to non-Christian oriental cults linked to the god Sabazio and the god Mitra, whose cults had spread to Rome starting from the 2nd century.

The peculiarity of these paintings sparked a wide debate in the 19th century, when the Jesuit archaeologist Giuseppe Marchi rediscovered them between 1842 and 1847. Until that time, in fact, no archaeologist or scholar accepted the idea that Christian tombs could coexist with pagan tombs in the same cemetery. At the end of the century, the Christian archaeologist Enrico Stevenson realized that the entire underground complex was composed of several private hypogea, which had been connected to each other at different times. Finally, between 1951 and 1952, on behalf of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, the priest Antonio Ferrua carried out a series of excavation campaigns that shed light on what for many was still a real mystery.

The catacomb complex is arranged on three levels, of which the oldest is the one that is found deepest, where the hypogeum of Vibia is located, which gives its name to the entire complex. The catacomb was short-lived and can be dated to the second half of the 4th century. It is composed of eight separate private hypogea, that is, belonging to families: it was therefore not a Christian community cemetery like most of the other Roman catacombs. Since we are in an era in which Christianity was not the only religion of the empire, but coexisted with other cults, it is easy to understand that this socio-religious situation is also reflected in the cemeteries, especially the private ones: the burial of members of the same family, or of related families, who belonged to different cults, explains the presence of Christian tombs next to pagan tombs.