Behind the large wooden door of a cloister just a few steps from Rome’s Pantheon, visitors find a quiet courtyard that still reads as a working religious space rather than a museum. The central garden holds a pond with goldfish and turtles, olive trees, two large palms and a fruiting tree whose bright oranges are used by the friars to make marmalade, while well-fed cats lounge in sunny patches of grass. In the convent around the cloister, 20 Dominican friars live and carry out their duties.
Friar Aucone described the cloister’s purpose in terms of its present-day routine, saying it is designed “to be a place of prayer, of meditation and therefore in some way to encourage prayer and the meditation of the friars.” The general public can only glimpse the space from the outside, but the frescoed walls behind the door provide a record of how the site’s religious life has intersected with episodes of church power.
Over the centuries, the cloister area has hosted figures such as St. Catherine of Siena and Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, both of whom are buried in the adjoining basilica. The building’s religious identity is tied to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, named for its Catholic dedication to the Virgin Mary over what once was a pagan temple to the Roman god of wisdom, Minerva. The basilica next to the cloister is where the site’s history also shows up in the people interred within it: five popes are buried inside the basilica.
Claudio Strinati, an art historian, pointed to the cloister’s scale and historical role, saying, “This cloister of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva is one of the largest and perhaps the most beautiful in all of Rome and it was a great cultural center in ancient times and it is even now.” He described Rome’s layered appeal as a product of what remains hidden, adding, “There is all the history hidden and therefore sometimes something is found and all generations, including mine, have discovered things,” before saying that later generations will continue to discover why so much is “secret and hidden” and why that mystery is part of “its charm.”
Strinati also traced the site’s changing ownership and functions: he said the area was where people gathered to cast ballots when Julius Caesar was in power. The Dominican Friars later built a church on the site in the late 1200s, and the original cloister was replaced by one designed by architect Guidetto Giudetti—a student of Michelangelo—around 1570. Some frescoes on the walls and vaulted ceilings depict rosary mysteries intended to encourage the contemplative life of the friars living in the convent.
Other frescoes, placed in niches and corners around the cloister, reference the fraught history of the location and the activities of its inhabitants. According to Strinati, the convent served as offices for the Roman Inquisition in the 16th century, and he said that among its functions was the tribunal where Galileo Galilei was interrogated. In the story described through the cloister’s setting, Galileo was forced to renounce his “heretical” idea that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun in 1633, standing before judges of the inquisition.
The complex’s iconography also preserves images tied to Catholic leadership and inquisitorial work. Portraits in medallions high on the walls show decapitated Dominican friars who worked as inquisitors, with just a stump for a neck and their heads held in their hands. The cloister’s narrative includes a specific account of Fra Angelico as well: he stayed at the convent while painting frescoes on the Niccoline chapel in the Vatican, and his likeness appears as an older figure in one of the medallions. Another medallion depicts St. Catherine of Siena, whose tomb is in the basilica next to the cloister; Friar Aucone said wryly that while they have her body, they had to give her skull to the Dominican Friars in Siena.
The cloister’s surrounding basilica and convent buildings also mark moments when church politics shaped Europe. The building surrounded the cloister served as the site of two papal conclaves that elected Pope Eugene IV in 1431 and Pope Nicholas V in 1447, and the basilica’s count of buried popes underscores the long-term institutional significance of the site as well.