page_title: Santa Sabina
section_title: Interior
hierarchical_section_title: Santa Sabina / Architecture / Interior
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Roma - Basilica di S. Sabina
context_page_description: The Basilica of Saint Sabina is a historic church on the Aventine Hill in Rome, Italy. It is a titular minor basilica and mother church of the Roman Catholic Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans.
  Santa Sabina is the oldest extant Roman basilica in Rome that preserves its original colonnaded rectangular plan and architectural style. Its decorations have been restored to their original restrained design. Other basilicas, such as Santa Maria Maggiore, are often heavily and ornately decorated. Because of its simplicity, the Santa Sabina represents the crossover from a roofed Roman forum to the churches of Christendom. It is especially famous for its 5th-century carved wood doors, with a cycle of Christian scenes that is one of the earliest to survive.
  Santa Sabina is perched high above the Tiber to the north and the Circus Maximus to the east. It is next to the small public park of Giardino degli Aranci, which has a scenic terrace overlooking Rome. It is a short distance from the headquarters of the Knights of Malta.
  Its Cardinal Priest is Jozef Tomko. It is the stational church for Ash Wednesday.
context_section_description: The original fifth-century apse mosaic was replaced in 1559 by a very similar fresco by Taddeo Zuccari. The composition probably remained unchanged: Christ is flanked by a good thief and a bad thief, seated on a hill while lambs drink from a stream at its base. The iconography of the mosaic was very similar to another 5th-century mosaic, destroyed in the 17th century, in Sant'Andrea in Catabarbara. An interesting feature of the interior is a framed hole in the floor, exposing a Roman era temple column that pre-dates Santa Sabina. This appears to be the remnant of the Temple of Juno erected on the hilltop site during Roman times, which was likely razed to allow construction of the basilica. The tall, spacious nave has twenty four columns of Proconnesian marble with perfectly matched Corinthian capitals and bases, which were reused from the Temple of Juno.
  
  The interior cells of the Dominican convent are little changed since the earliest days of the Order of Preachers. The cell of St. Dominic is still identified, though it has since been enlarged and converted to a chapel. Also, the original dining room still remains, in which St. Thomas Aquinas would dine when he lived in Rome.
caption: Side portico.
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