“Roma resultat ovans semper ornata per
  aevum.”

[Footnote H:  It is a remarkable fact, to be explained by the believers in the virtue of relics, that, notwithstanding the body of St. Cecilia was deposited perfect in her grave, and, as we shall see, was long after found complete, no less than five heads of St. Cecilia are declared to exist, or to have existed,—­for one has been lost,—­in different churches.  One is in the church of the SS.  Quattro Coronati, at Rome, which possessed it from a very early period; a second is at Paris, a third at Beauvais, a fourth was at Tours, and we have seen the reliquary in which a fifth is preserved in the old cathedral of Torcello.]

And thus once more the body of the virgin was left to repose in peace, once more the devout could offer their prayers to the Saint at the altar consecrated by her presence, and once more the superstitious could increase the number of the miracles wrought by her favor.  Through the long period of the fall and depression of Rome, her church continued to be a favorite one with the people of the city, and with the pilgrims to it.  From time to time it was repaired and adorned, and in the thirteenth century the walls of its portico were covered with a series of frescoes, representing the events of St. Cecilia’s life, and the finding of her body by Paschal.  These frescoes—­precious as specimens of reawakening Art, and especially precious at Rome, because of the little that was done there at that period—­were all, save one, long since destroyed in some “restoration” of the church.  The one that was preserved is now within the church, and represents in its two divisions the burial of the Saint by Pope Urban, and her appearance in St. Peter’s Church to the sleeping Paschal, whose figure is rendered with amusing naivete and literalness.

Meanwhile, after the translation of St. Cecilia’s body, the catacombs remained much in the same neglected state as before, falling more and more into ruin, but still visited from year to year by the pilgrims, whom even pillage and danger could not keep from Rome.  For two centuries,—­from the thirteenth to the fifteenth,—­scarcely any mention of them is to be found.  Petrarch, in his many letters about Rome, dwells often on the sacredness of the soil within the city, in whose crypts and churches so many saints and martyrs lie buried, but hardly refers to the catacombs themselves, and never in such a way as to show that they were an object of interest to him, though a lover of all Roman relics and a faithful worshipper of the saints.  It was near the end of the sixteenth century that a happy accident—­the falling in of the road outside the Porta Salara—­brought to light the streets of the Cemetery of St. Priscilla, and awakened in Antonio Bosio a zeal for the exploration of the catacombs which led him to devote the remainder of his long life to the pursuit, and by study, investigation, and observation, to lay the solid basis of the thorough and comprehensive acquaintance with subterranean Rome which has been extended by the researches of a long line of able scholars down to the present day.  But to Bosio the chief honor is due, as the earliest, the most exact, and the most indefatigable of the explorers.