The church of S. Maria Antiqua is situated in the Roman Forum at the foot of the Palatine Hill. It was discovered in 1900 and its surviving wall paintings represent a unique heritage in the Christian world between the 6th and the 11th centuries. The church was inserted into an existing imperial complex, dating back to Domitian (81-96 CE), in the course of the 6th century. Over the following five centuries, it was decorated with an extraordinary series of murals bearing witness to imperial, papal and monastic patronage.

The church was abandoned after an earthquake in 847, but the Atrium and the Oratory of the Forty Martyrs continued to be used throughout the 11th century. S. Maria Antiqua’s pictorial decoration testifies to the development in the early Middle Ages both of painting in Rome and of the Byzantine world as a whole.

The ‘palimpsest wall’, in the sanctuary, is considered by many a milestone in the history of medieval painting and attests to the development of the decorative phases of the church through the overlapping of eight layers of painted frescoes. Through its palimpsests wall and and its more than twenty pictorial phases, S. Maria Antiqua challenges scholars and visitors to read a complex multilayered pictorial decoration and to measure themselves dynamically with obliterations, reuses and cohabitations of murals from different periods.