Santo Stefano Rotondo

When you visit Cambridge, you find in its center one of its oldest buildings, the Round Church of c. 1130.  Designed to evoke the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, it is one of only four such churches in England. 

Person visiting Cambridge Round Church, c. September, 2009 

England’s awareness of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher emerged from the First Crusade, thirty years before this church was built.  700 years earlier, Rome had built today’s Station Church, Santo Stefano Rotondo.  What was their link to the church in Jerusalem?

Mainly the fact that they’d built it.  Constantine ordered the building of the church in Jerusalem in 326, with pilgrims like his mother Saint Helen flocking to the site.  With the discovery of Saint Stephen’s bones in the Holy Land in 415, Pope Leo the Great (or possibly Simplicius who succeeded him) ordered the building of a church to house his relics in Rome.

Of the same scale as the church in Jerusalem, Saint Stephen’s shares the feeling of austere simplicity brought with age.  If not the vending of falafel outside its doors.