Chiesa di Sant'Antonio Abate all'Esquilino

The church was built in 1308 in place of the earlier Sant'Andrea Catabarbara and rebuilt from 1481 under Sixtus IV; a hospital for St Anthony's fire stood beside it from the second half of the thirteenth century. In 1928 the Holy See bought the church and its adjacencies, the church went to Russian Catholics of the Byzantine rite, and the annexed buildings were turned into the Pontificio Collegio Russicum, a centre of Russian and oriental studies. Sant'Andrea Catabarbara, the church this one replaced, had been made in the second half of the fifth century under Simplicius out of a hall of the Basilica di Giunio Basso, the domus of Junius Annius Bassus, consul of 331, which the Gothic general Valila gave for the purpose; it was demolished in 1930 for the Seminario Pontificio di Studi Orientali in via Napoleone III, and parts of it were incorporated into Sant'Antonio Abate.