San Sebastiano de Via Papae

San Sebastiano de Via Papae was a small church in the Sant'Eustachio rione of Rome that was demolished in the 1590s in order to enable the construction of the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle.

The church's dedication to Saint Sebastian comes from a tradition that it was built on the spot where the Christian noblewoman Lucina rescued the saint's corpse from the sewer where it had been thrown after his martyrdom. In regard to that tradition's historical reliability, the archaeologist Mariano Armellini is skeptical, but nevertheless deems it certain that the antiquity of the church means that it references some definite memory of the martyr.

The designation of via Papae (Latin: way of the Pope), by which the church was commonly referred, recalls its location along a ceremonial papal route that began at the present site of Sant'Andrea della Valle and the piazza which stands in front of it, which before the sixteenth century was called Piazza di Siena. For that reason, the church is called San Sebastiano in piazza di Siena in a catalog dating from the pontificate of Pope Pius V (1566–1572).

The church is not to be confused with the similarly-named San Sebastiano in Via Pontificum, which was in the Borgo and had fallen into ruin by the pontificate of Pius V.

The first surviving references to the small church of San Sebastiano date from the twelfth century, where it is listed in various registers of churches in the city of Rome. Although it was counted as a parish church, it remained subsidiary to larger churches in the neighborhood; it seems that it was originally among the dependent churches of San Lorenzo in Damaso, as is referenced in an 1186 bull of Pope Urban III. In the thirteenth century, however, there arose a dispute over the church between the priests of San Lorenzo in Damaso and those of Sant'Eustachio, the resolution of which is noted in a bull of Pope Gregory IX dated April 9, 1231. The apparent outcome was that its administration was transferred to the priests of Sant'Eustachio.

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