The catacomb from the 4th to the 8th century was the cemetery of the Christians, faithful of the Ecclesia Carinensis, a rural diocese recorded in the epistles of Pope Gregory the Great. This territory, served by the Via Valeria and connected to the hilly hinterland by the course of the Torrente della Grazia, was involved until the Byzantine age in trade relations between Sicily, Italy and Africa. The leaden seal of Bishop Felix panormitanus, present at the Lateran Council of 649-654, testifies to the relations that existed between the neighboring dioceses of Carines and Panormus during the period of transition from the Byzantine to the Islamic age. The cemetery project began after the Peace of the Church, evolving with four phases for more than three centuries serving the hillside settlement of St. Nicholas and neighboring areas. Promoters of this funerary reality were Christians from the upper-middle class of Roman society of that time, but the concrete responsibility in its realization fell on the ecclesiastical authorities, who from the age of Constantine onward were very active in the populous rural areas of Sicily.
OF AN ARCOSOLIUM
The underground architecture of the catacomb imposed the choice of a suitable context in order to bear its excavation.
The authority supervised the work and assigned the spaces to individual households: the correct orientation N-S and E-W of the several intercepted galleries met the design rules in the orderly distribution of the arcosoli, sometimes with painted decoration of floral or family character or with biblically inspired images. Individual owners later intervened in the same spaces by making changes to the arcosoles and converting them into multiform cubicles. We recognized 10 burial chambers with arcosoles and a few loculi, sometimes even with caissons/sarcophagi digged in the rock. They were isolated from the belonging gallery and closed by gates. Two paintings with the Adoration of the Magi, one of popular style and the other more refined, establish between the 4th and 5th centuries the transformation of an arcosolium into the dromos and cubicle X.10. The painted south wall survived the alterations of the chamber and passes on to us the memory over the centuries of a veneration, dear to the possessores. From the 6th century white-plastered pit tombs occupied the floor of cubicles and galleries. We point out the one in cubicle X.15 with the composite monogram, a magical sign defending the tomb, and the inscription of Erma buried in gallery IX on Tuesday, November 1, AD 651.
