Rome, the Mysteries, and the Seat of the Papacy

The Italian peninsula holds a religious history of two great acts: it was the heart of Roman religion and empire, and it became the seat of Western Christianity. Roman religion was, at its civic core, a matter of pax deorum, keeping right relations with the gods through scrupulous public ritual, augury, and sacrifice, on which the safety of the state depended, overlaid on an older Italic and Etruscan substratum and progressively identified with the Greek pantheon. But the religious life of Roman Italy was famously absorptive: it drew in the mystery cults of the wider Mediterranean, including Mithraism, the initiatory cult of the bull-slaying god popular among soldiers, whose underground temples dot the empire, and the worship of Cybele and Isis. Italy was also the setting (though not the origin) of Pythagoreanism, the mystical-mathematical brotherhood founded by the Greek Pythagoras in the Greek cities of the south.

The peninsula's second act is Christianity: Rome, where Peter and Paul were martyred, became the seat of the bishop who claimed primacy over the whole Church, and the Vatican the centre of Roman Catholicism for the world's largest body of Christians. From the catacombs of the persecuted early Church to the basilicas of the papacy and the art of the Renaissance, Italy carries the whole arc from pagan Rome to the capital of Latin Christendom.