Chapter Nine

Into the City of the Dead

The excavations began in 1940, in the area of the tombs discovered during the burial of Pius XI. The team planned to move west toward the area directly under the center of the Vatican — the place where legend and ancient writings placed Peter’s grave. It is hard to overstate the difficult conditions involved in the excavation. Overhead stood one of the largest and heaviest structures on Earth. Underneath was a totally unknown area. In between lay a gray, dusty, subterranean world filled 1,600 years before with debris. The excavation required the construction of concrete pillars to support the vast bulk of the Vatican above. Then it was slow, hard work to excavate the ancient debris underneath, piece by piece.76

In addition, all work had to be performed without power tools.⁷⁷ A small army of workers, sworn to secrecy, was required, given the immense magnitude of the project.⁷⁸ Unventilated, poorly lit, and incredibly hot in summer, the Necropolis was a terribly difficult place to work, particularly when required to use only crude tools. Overhead the normal work of the Vatican continued while the excavation went on silently, wholly concealed from the thousands of daily visitors. Underneath, the Ferrua team (quickly excluding Kaas from any day-to-day supervision) faced hard choices. The excavation itself on occasion required the destruction of ancient walls and monuments. The team was about to do a very hard job very badly.

It took until 1941 for the research to be completed, the team lined up, and the secret excavation to begin.79 It is remarkable that it began at all. Outside the subterranean grottos, the Old World perished. The Nazis, joined by Mussolini’s Italy, broke France’s back, gaining complete control of non-Russian Europe. Brave England stood almost alone. Blackshirts marched through Rome in triumph carrying fasces in a strange imitation of the eagles of ancient Roman legions. Vatican City became a small island in a Fascist sea of fake legionaries and celebrating crowds.

Beneath the Vatican, the team almost immediately encountered other pagan tombs, traveling back in time to the height of Roman power around A.D. 150. They discovered remarkable, bright floral drawings and a large painting depicting a long-dead Roman master examining the ledgers of a servant.⁸⁰ After several weeks spent in the first new tomb, they unearthed the so-called Valerius Tomb.⁸¹ In this classic Roman family tomb, there were statues in niches depicting various generations of the Valerius family beginning around 130.

Among statues of pagan gods in the Valerius Tomb, the team found the first important clue that Peter’s remains were near. There were crudely drawn pictures of Christ and Peter bearing the partial inscription: “Peter pray Christ Jesus for the holy.…” The remainder of the inscription was missing.⁸² These inscriptions, written in the middle of a second-century pagan cemetery in Rome, would have been the ancient world equivalent of Isis graffiti on the White House today, or a cross drawn on the Shrine of Khomeini in Teheran. How they came to be or what ancient braveheart risking death wrote them was a mystery. Yet the inscriptions did provide an important confirmation that someone in the ancient world had been willing to risk death to identify this site, in the middle of a pagan cemetery in the hostile Roman capital, with Peter.83

Little by little, the excavation began to unravel the hidden Necropolis so long suspended in time and frozen in place. There was no hint at all in any ancient writings of the amazing world the excavators were now unlocking. No surviving authority ever mentioned that Vatican Hill had once served as the home of numerous Roman family tombs — some housing generations of Roman families stretching over two hundred years. It was apparent that a number of other magnificent, largely pagan tombs existed between the location of the Peter inscription and the center of St. Peter’s Basilica. Moreover, the Ferrua team quickly realized that there were other parallel streets with parallel tombs on other sides. The team was working in a second-century Roman city of the dead containing hundreds of memorials from the height of power of the Roman Empire.⁸⁴

In fact, the team had uncovered a totally forgotten collection of the legendary family tombs of Rome, like those that had once also lined the Appian Way. But unlike the Appian Way tombs, which survived only in written descriptions and ruins, these family tombs were wholly intact, frozen in time since 337, well before the barbarian invasions. The destroyed tombs along the Appian Way had commemorated the greatest and most ancient families of Rome, but the family tombs in the Necropolis commemorated the “newer men” who ascended to power or prosperity after A.D. 100. They chronicled in murals, busts, and the like, the history of the Classic Age of the Roman Empire. Because they had been forgotten, they survived the vast barbarian invasions that plunged Europe into darkness. The tombs were magnificent — an astounding archeological find. But they were not Peter’s grave. The great question remained whether Peter would be found.

The excavators believed that once they reached the center, they would find a large bronze sarcophagus with Peter inside, based on the fifth-century account. It made sense to Ferrua that Constantine would have honored Peter in this way. Ferrua and Kaas were anxious to skip the intervening pagan tombs and proceed as rapidly as possible to the center. Kaas, however, the nominal leader of the project, was much disturbed by the destruction caused by Ferrua’s excavation. In particular, he was deeply troubled by the nonchalance with which the Ferrua team treated the human remains they encountered.85

Kaas’ disquiet was well justified. Even allowing for the difficult conditions, the Ferrua team ignored basic accepted archeological precautions. Few photographs were taken of the numerous murals and inscriptions they encountered — artifacts of incalculable value. In fact, no comprehensive photographic record was made. No effort was made to preserve the colored murals and inscriptions. Given their exposure to the damp and dirty atmosphere after two thousand years of burial under rubble, fading was inevitable without preservation. How much was lost will never be known. Inscriptions of profound meaning were dismissed as incomprehensible gibberish. Human remains were ignored or bundled up and stored away without any contemporaneous examination by medical anthropologists.⁸⁶ After the excavation of two more large family tombs filled with wonderful portraits of swans in purple fields, pictures of Hercules, and a masterpiece mosaic of Pluto, the god of the dead, on a chariot, as well as the ashes and busts of centuries of ancestors,⁸⁷ Kaas called a temporary halt to the excavation of new tombs and the race to the center. He insisted on a cleanup and cataloging of the excavated areas.

The Ferrua team used the pause to excavate a dirt passageway.88 Under a small slab, they stumbled into another shocking surprise — a small, hidden underground tomb from about A.D. 250, containing remarkable Christian images of Jonah and the whale, the Good Shepherd, a fisherman, and the resurrected Christ in a heavenly chariot.⁸⁹ These were among the earliest surviving depictions of these Christian stories. The physical depiction of these stories within a few hundred yards of the seat of Roman power was an amazing act of courage by an unknown, talented artist, who risked horrible death for creating these Christian images. It was a remarkable find, but it did not reference Peter in any way.

So far, the Ferrua team had only found the single earlier reference to Peter. Yet the team realized that Constantine faced immense difficulty in his attempt to center the first St. Peter’s basilica over an exact spot on Vatican Hill, requiring massive fill and the desecration of a centuries-old cemetery.⁹⁰ There were many other much easier, more level building sites within a short distance. Constantine would have undertaken such a difficult and elaborate building project only to center the basilica directly over Peter’s grave. Moreover, as the team moved deeper into the Necropolis, they noticed an astounding fact. The Roman engineers had cropped tombs and added fill to center the altar of the basilica directly over an exact and precise center point, not at the hill’s original top.⁹¹ Surely Constantine would only have gone to such extensive effort if the grave of Saint Peter was the exact center point.

Kaas met with Pius XII and outlined the findings. Pius then ordered the project to proceed directly into the underground center of St. Peter’s — the legendary grave of Peter. He insisted that the project remain in absolute secrecy. The world would know nothing at all of the project for ten years.