The gridiron of Saint Lawrence

In the first chapel to the right of the entrance, behind glass, hangs an iron gridiron, and on it Saint Lawrence is said to have been killed in the year 258.

As a deacon he looked after the money of the church of Rome, and when the city prefect demanded that he hand over those treasures, he gathered the poor, the sick and the widows of the city and presented them as the wealth he had in his care. The punishment that followed was meant to be slow and public, and he is credited with the remark that he was done on one side and could be turned over.

Whether this is the real gridiron can no longer be established, and the church itself makes no firm claims about it either, though it has stood here as a relic since the seventeenth century.

Against the third pillar on the right hangs something of an entirely different kind: the tomb of the French painter Nicolas Poussin, who worked in Rome for forty years and died here in 1665. The monument only appeared a century and a half later, paid for by the writer Chateaubriand, who felt there ought to be something.

We leave the square by Via Frattina in the northeast corner and follow it to the crossing with a broad street full of shop windows.