THE HEART OF IT
The Crypt of the Popes: the 'Little Vatican'
The most venerated chamber in St Callixtus — nine popes, Greek inscriptions on the stone, and a martyrdom in 258.
See catacombs tours on GetYourGuide ↗A small room at the centre
For all the scale of St Callixtus — twenty kilometres of galleries, half a million burials — its heart is a single small chamber: the Crypt of the Popes. It earned the nickname 'the little Vatican' because it is the burial place of nine popes of the third century, laid to rest together in the cemetery they and their Church administered. Standing in it, you're at the historical core of the entire complex, the reason St Callixtus matters more than almost any other catacomb.
Names carved in Greek
What gives the crypt its extraordinary immediacy is that you can still read the names. Several of the popes' original inscriptions survive, carved into the stone in Greek — the language of the early Roman Church — including Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius and Eutychian. These aren't reconstructions or plaques; they're the actual third-century lettering, cut when these men were buried. Few places let you stand so directly in front of the record of the early papacy.
The martyrdom of Sixtus II
The crypt witnessed one of the sharpest moments of the persecutions. In 258, during the reign of the emperor Valerian, Pope Sixtus II was seized and beheaded while he was celebrating the liturgy in this very cemetery, and he too was buried in the Crypt of the Popes. It's a reminder that the catacombs were not only where the early Church buried its dead, but sometimes where its leaders died — the history here is not abstract.
Lost and found again
The crypt, like the whole cemetery, was lost for centuries. As Rome shrank and the catacombs fell out of use, they were forgotten, buried under vineyards on the Appian Way. It was the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi — the founder of modern Christian archaeology — who rediscovered the Crypt of the Popes in 1854, identifying it from the surviving inscriptions. That rediscovery is why you can visit it today, and why the names on the walls can be read at all.
Seeing it on your visit
The Crypt of the Popes is on the guided route, so every visit to St Callixtus passes through it — you don't need to seek it out or pay extra. Your guide will point out the inscriptions and tell the story of the popes and of Sixtus II. It's a small, quiet, low-lit space, and the natural place on the tour to pause and take in what the catacombs are: not a curiosity, but the resting place of the people who built the early Church, still here, still named, beneath the Roman road.