Basilica of San Bartolomeo all'Isola

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On Tiber Island, where ancient Rome kept a temple of healing, Emperor Otto III founded a church in 998 in honour of his martyred friend Adalbert of Prague, and it soon received the relics of the apostle Bartholomew, which rest today in a red porphyry basin beneath the high altar. Fourteen ancient Roman columns still line its nave behind a Baroque facade of 1624, and a carved medieval wellhead recalls the island's healing waters. In the Jubilee year 2000, John Paul II dedicated the basilica to the memory of the martyrs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, entrusted to the Community of Sant'Egidio, so that on the apostle's feast of August 24 the oldest witness and the newest meet in one church.