Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo al Celio

The basilica's own account says it was raised from 398 by the senator Byzantius or by his son Pammachius, on the site of a building of the first or second century used first as a domus ecclesiae, and that it is first cited in the acts of a synod held by Pope Symmachus in 499 as Titulus Pammachii or Titulus Byzantii. It was damaged by Alaric's Visigoths in the sack of 410 and by an earthquake in 442, and sacked by the Normans in 1084; Paschal II, pope from 1099 to 1118, promoted the restoration and added the campanile and the portico. Roma Capitale records that it was rebuilt from the foundations in the twelfth century, the tall campanile set on the remains of the Temple of Claudius, and that in 1216 Cardinal Cencio Savelli, the future Honorius III, raised the portico to create the gallery above it and the Cosmatesque portal with an eagle and two lions. Substantial work followed in 1715 under Cardinal Fabrizio Paolucci, and the Romanesque façade was reinstated between 1950 and 1952 at the wish of Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman. The ceiling is coffered, of the sixteenth century; a large Pomarancio fresco fills the apse; and a slab about halfway down the nave marks the place where the saints were martyred in aedibus propriis.