Basilica di San Sisto Vecchio

Roma Capitale records that the dedication to Pope Sixtus II, martyred in 258 at the catacombs of San Callisto, appears in a sixth-century document but that the church had been built in the previous century. It was renewed under Innocent III and then entrusted to Dominic de Guzmán, who founded his first Roman convent here; the Dominicans left after two years, moving in 1220 to Santa Sabina, and Dominic used the monastery for his new order of enclosed Dominican nuns, largely drawn from the Tempoline of the monastery of Santa Maria in Tempulo. Church and monastery were restored again under Sixtus IV. At the end of the sixteenth century, the area being malarial, the nuns obtained a move to a new church in Rione Monti, and from then San Sisto was called Vecchio to distinguish it from Santi Domenico e Sisto, called Sisto Nuovo. In the eighteenth century Benedict XIII had the ruinous complex rebuilt by Filippo Raguzzini, who put up the present façade and a new cloister. Since the end of the 1800s the complex has been run by the Congregation of Dominican Sisters founded by Suor Maria Antonia Lalia, and it houses a private school. The interior, once of three naves, is now a single nave decorated in stucco, keeping remains of a late-thirteenth-century fresco cycle between the thirteenth-century apse and the narrower fifteenth-century one; the cloister galleries are painted with Stories of the Life of St Dominic by Andrea Casale, of the eighteenth century.