The Church of St. Bartholomew in Tiberina Island
is located on the Tiberina Island, between the Ghetto and the neighborhood of Trastevere.
It’s dedicated to Bartholomew, one of the original twelve apostles. His martyrdom was terrible:
he was skinned alive!
According to the legend, the church was settled in the precise spot where was the Temple of Aesculapius.
Below the left column on the facade, there is a cannonball embedded in the base of the column.
The cannonball got stuck in 1849, and miraculously failed to explode.
The other curiosity of this church is the famous Cappella dell’Addolorata ( the Chapel of our lady of sorrows), even called the “Drown chapel” where the bodies of those drowned in the river Tiber are still buried.
The chapel is even remarkable for its particular decoration.
In fact, in the underground environment of the chapel were collected along the centuries the miserable remains of the drowned in the river Tiber that no one claimed and even the bodies of the people killed by brigands, who lay abandoned and unburied on the banks of the river, and were buried here.
Well decorations were made with… their bones!
According to a macabre taste typical of the Baroque period, which can be even found in another couple of places in Rome.
