ABSTRACT
This study explores the Caelian hill in Rome as a neighbourhood in the period from Constantine’s arrival in 312 CE through Alaric’s sack of the city in 410 CE. It puts together elements of the late antique topography of the Caelian that are often kept apart – public and private spaces, still-functioning imperial monuments and late antique structures, Christian and pagan shrines – and views them as parts of an always interacting whole. In narrative and graphic forms, it reconstructs the development of this neighbourhood at a human scale, both spatially and chronologically, through four roughly generational intervals, and argues that streets and human movement through them were at least as important to the Christianization of the Caelian neighbourhood as its buildings.
