Santa Maria Maggiore
— a Roman August that remembers snow.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest Marian basilica in Rome. The bell tower is the tallest in the city, seventy-five metres of Romanesque brick that survived the medieval centuries when most of Rome did not. Inside, the mosaics on the nave walls and the triumphal arch are older than almost anything else still in use: fifth century, gold tesserae catching the light from the clerestory windows. The Cosmatesque floor has been walked since the twelfth century. The coffered ceiling above it was reportedly gilded with the first gold brought back from the Americas. Pope Francis is buried here.
Santa Maria Maggiore, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Santa Maria Maggiore stands on the summit of the Esquiline Hill, the largest of the seven hills of Rome. It is one of the four papal major basilicas, together with St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, and St. Paul Outside the Walls, and the only one whose original fifth-century structure has survived largely intact. Pope Sixtus III dedicated it between 432 and 440, soon after the Council of Ephesus affirmed the title Theotokos. Two ancient monuments mark its squares: a fluted Corinthian column from the Basilica of Maxentius, moved here in 1614, and an Egyptian obelisk behind the apse brought from the Mausoleum of Augustus. The basilica is a five-minute walk from Roma Termini.
The basilica reads as a layered timeline in stone. The bell tower, completed in 1377 and rising to roughly seventy-five metres, is the tallest in Rome. The nave preserves thirty-six fluted Ionic columns from the original fifth-century building. Above them run the mosaic cycles of the Old Testament and the triumphal arch, some of the earliest narrative Christian mosaics still in their setting. The floor is Cosmatesque, laid in the twelfth century by the Cosmati workshops who reused porphyry and serpentine from imperial Rome. The coffered ceiling, designed by Giuliano da Sangallo in the late fifteenth century, was reportedly gilded with gold sent by Ferdinand and Isabella from the first shipments returning from the Americas.
Entry to the basilica is free. It is open daily, roughly seven in the morning to seven in the evening, with the Borghese Chapel and the Sistine Chapel (the burial chapel built by Sixtus V, not the one in the Vatican) accessible on the same hours. Shoulders and knees must be covered. The Salus Populi Romani, a Byzantine Marian icon to which Pope Francis was particularly devoted, is enshrined in the Borghese Chapel; Francis was interred in a tomb near that chapel on 26 April 2025. The museum and loggia, with the thirteenth-century facade mosaics by Filippo Rusuti, require a small ticket.