Rome Capuchin Crypts and San Clemente Underground Guided Tour

Explore Rome's Capuchin Crypts and Basilica San Clemente on an evening tour of hidden faith, art, and underground layers with a live English mother-tongue guide.

Getting started

Begin your evening guided tour by meeting your live English mother-tongue guide at the designated starting point in central Rome. After a brief introduction to the route, your guide organizes all entry tickets and provides headsets so you can hear clearly throughout. The group then sets off on foot toward the first underground site, ready to explore Rome's hidden side.

What to expect

Capuchin Crypts

This first stop takes you into the Capuchin Crypts, a complex of six chapels decorated with the bones of nearly 4,000 Capuchin monks.

Features

• Inside the Capuchin Crypts, you walk through six distinct chapels where skulls, femurs, and vertebrae form arches, chandeliers, and altarpieces, creating a direct visual meditation on mortality and faith.
• Entry to Capuchin Crypts is included as part of your evening guided tour with a live English mother-tongue guide, so you proceed inside without arranging separate tickets.
• With headsets provided, you can follow your live English mother-tongue guide's commentary as they explain how Rome understood faith, art, and death in this unique space.

Basilica San Clemente

Next, the tour continues to the Basilica San Clemente, where you descend through multiple historical layers beneath a functioning church.

Features

• In the Basilica San Clemente, your guide leads you down four levels, from the present 12th-century basilica to earlier Christian and Roman buildings that reach back to the 1st century.
• Entry to Basilica San Clemente is included, and your live English mother-tongue guide uses the headset system to point out details that you might otherwise miss in the dim underground corridors.
• As you move through these levels, you encounter fragments that include the oldest written vernacular Italian, which your guide highlights to show how language and worship evolved here.

Mithras temple

Deep beneath San Clemente, you reach a 2nd-century Mithras temple, one of Rome's subterranean sanctuaries dedicated to the cult of Mithras.

Features

• In the Mithras temple, you see the compact ritual space and altar where followers once gathered, gaining a sense of how different faiths coexisted in underground Rome.
• Entry to Mithras temple is part of your included access at San Clemente, and your live English mother-tongue guide uses the headsets to explain how this 2nd-century space fits into the broader story of the basilica's four levels.

Caravaggio works

During the evening, your guide also takes you to view selected Caravaggio works that connect painting with the tour's themes of belief and mortality.

Features

• At the Caravaggio works, you examine the artist's use of dramatic light and shadow while your guide relates these paintings to how Rome has visually expressed faith and death across centuries.
• The visit to Caravaggio works is integrated into the evening guided tour, with your expert guide and headsets ensuring you can focus on the canvases without worrying about access or logistics.

Wrapping up

The guided portion concludes after your visit to the underground areas at Basilica San Clemente and the Mithras temple, leaving you free to continue exploring the surrounding streets of Rome or make your way back using local transport or a taxi, which is not included.