San Sisto Vecchio

The Basilica of San Sisto Vecchio (in Via Appia) is one of e over sixty minor basilicas among the churches of Rome, and a titular church since 600 AD. As such, it is connected to the title of a Cardinal priest, the current holder of which is Marian Jaworski of Ukraine.

The Basilica was constructed in the fourth century and is recorded as the Titulus Crescentianae, thus relating the church to a certain Crescentia, (possibly a Roman woman who founded the church.) According to tradition, the church was established by Pope Anastasius I (399–401).

The church is dedicated to St. Pope Sixtus II and houses his relics, (transferred here from the Catacomb of Callixtus in the sixth century.)

San Sisto was rebuilt in the early 13th century by Pope Innocent III. The current church is the result of the restorations of Pope Benedict XIII in the 18th century, which left only the bell tower and the apse from the medieval church.

A 13th-century fresco cycle depicting scenes from the New Testament and the Apocrypha has been preserved.

Pope Honorius III entrusted the reform of the monastery at San Sisto Vecchio to Saint Dominic in the 1220s, intending it as part of the reformation of women's religious life in Rome. In 1219 Honorius then invited Dominic and his companions to take up permanent residence at the ancient Roman basilica of Santa Sabina, which they did in the early 1220, after that they founded a convent and studium on June 5, 1222. Thus forming the original studium of the Dominican Order in Rome, out of which the 16th-century College of Saint Thomas at Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) would grow.

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