Unfolding the layers of memory in time and space

Abstract

In his seminal work ‘Landscape and Memory’, historian Simon Schama persuasively sums up the complexity of meanings brought about by man’s engagement with landscape, telling us that, “before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock … it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.” Although directed to a more traditional concept of the outdoor landscape, this reasoning equally resonates with the very core of the raison d'être of the Catacombs of St Agatha. Our forefathers’ direct intervention in the strata of rock in order to create this underground basilica in the negative, was not only a deed to honour the saint, but a visionary act of faith; one that fostered belief in the unearthing of the place’s memory reservoir in order to permanently reveal the crypt’s virtuous aura of St Agatha, excavated in the same place where in the early decades of Christianity, she is believed to have sought divine solace from her tragic fate.