Rome, Sacred Ground for Nearly 3,000 Years, and Counting

Islamic Rome: Grand showpiece and quiet struggles

The Islamic presence in Italy dates to the eighth century, however it wasn’t till 1995 that the formally acknowledged Great Mosque of Rome opened in Parioli, a neighborhood that’s a brief hop by taxi from the Borghese Gallery. The mosque, the most important in Europe, is a gleaming, low-slung fashionable construction that artfully bridges East and West. A fountain close to the doorway refreshes a plaza whose pavement echoes the dazzling geometry of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, and the rows of twinned pillars resulting in the travertine-clad sanctuary recall Bernini’s monumental colonnade at St. Peter’s Square.

The inside is a examine in curving strains, with low-hanging round chandeliers ringing the central dome, intricately tiled partitions and a wealthy Persian carpet swirling throughout the ground. You enter to the sound of hen tune, you pray in a luminous rotunda, and also you emerge from the compound right into a pine and cypress grove on the fringe of upscale Parioli. Except when a prepare rumbles by, it’s a lush, hushed precinct.

Maybe too hushed. Rome’s fast-growing Islamic neighborhood, lots of them immigrants from Morocco, Bangladesh, Albania or Senegal, resides on the opposite facet of city in gritty, bustling piazzas close to the Termini rail station. For most Roman Muslims, attending Friday providers within the Great Mosque would require taking a day without work from work.

“The Great Mosque is a showpiece, a symbol, a place of pride,” notes Imam Yahya Pallavicini, president of COREIS (the Italian Islamic Religious Community). “But the city’s Muslim residents are more likely to pray at smaller unofficial neighborhood mosques, often located in private homes or garages.” On a typical Friday on the Great Mosque, a whole bunch collect in an area constructed for hundreds.

The issue that modern Muslims have to find state-sanctioned Roman homes of worship brings to thoughts the plight of Rome’s first Christians. Unlike Jews and adherents of Mithras and Isis, Christians have been violently persecuted — and a few of Rome’s earliest church buildings, together with St. Peter’s, are martyriums: websites the place saints have been slain for his or her beliefs. The church buildings of Santa Sabina, Santa Prassede, Santa Pudenziana and Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura have been additionally sanctified by struggling. With their crystalline mosaics and skinny, pure mild, these humbly elegant basilicas conjure the time when an odd, fervent, unyielding new cult rose from the ashes of empire.

Every age, each religion, each pilgrim makes Rome sacred anew.