Chiesa di San Tommaso in Formis

Roma Capitale binds the church to the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and its founder John of Matha, who spent his last years probably in the cell behind the little window above the Arch of Dolabella and Silanus and died on 17 December 1213; his remains were first entombed in a marble mausoleum in the church and were moved to Spain in 1655. The church was built around the tenth century as the abbey church of a Benedictine monastery, though the date cannot be fixed because the written record was destroyed. The first attestations are of 1209, when Innocent III gave the existing monastery to the Trinitarians, who made it their seat and adapted part of it as a hospital for the poor, the sick, pilgrims and slaves ransomed by the order. Around 1380, under Urban VI, the order had to leave Rome for supporting the antipope Clement VII, and the Vatican Chapter took the complex and closed the hospital. In 1532 the church was restored using material from the hospital to save money. In 1571 Pius V returned the church and what was left of hospital and monastery to the Trinitarians, who lost them again at his death months later. A restoration of 1663 gave the church its façade, with a portal under a triangular tympanum inscribed DIVO THOMAE APOST(OLO) D(ICATUM). The complex went back to the Trinitarians in 1898 and the church reopened for worship in 1926, the hospital by then demolished.