The spire in white  travertine.

A Walk-Around Guide
to All Saints' Anglican Church Rome

by the Rev.d Canon David Palmer

Except on a Sunday, when we use the porch door in Via Gesu e Maria, it is likely that you entered All Saints' from the Via del Babuino -the Street of the Baboon. (That is the ancient misnomer for the long headless, and now partly restored statue of Silenus on the fountain trough nearby).

You may have felt disorientated at first, until you saw that the porch and corridor stand alongside the sanctuary. The high altar is at the compass east end, unlike that of several celebrated churches in Rome, including St. Peters. Thus, you will have entered the church at the east end of the south aisle, where you will find an area dedicated to Welcome with notice boards, leaflets and a visitors book.

On entering the church

First, however, you will have passed under the tower and spire, and you may have noticed in the porch an inscription which records that the spire was finished only in 1937, exactly fifty years after the church was completed. It is 140feet (42.7metres) high, and its white stone exterior (slabs of travertine quarried, cut and polished near Tivoli) gives our spire an exceptional brilliance in sunshine against a blue sky, and there is no other like it in Rome. Pope John XXIII told a former chaplain how he enjoyed picking it out with his field glasses from the windows of the Vatican Palace. It can be seen from many other vantage points in and around the city without the need of binoculars, or of aspiring to live in the Papal Apartments. Both the tower and the whole exterior of All Saints' are protected from any alteration by the stringent rules of the body which governs the visual aspect of central Rome. We are here to stay………..

In the circular porch, the lancet window is glazed in colour. The panel shows St. Chad, holding in his hand a model of Lichfield Cathedral. Between the laying of the foundation stone at Easter 1882 and the eventual opening at Easter 1887 building had reached a crucial stage. A former Bishop of Lichfield, was good enough to promote, in his diocese in the English Midlands, the financial needs of All Saints'. This window depicting the first Bishop of Lichfield (Mercia) who died in 672, was given in memory of a Lichfield couple, John and Maud Clayton. Also commemorated, inside the church on a brass tablet, is the long residence in Rome of the daughters of one Prebendary Simeon Clayton of Lichfield. Remember to look up at St. Chad on the way out if you are already inside when you read this.

Also on your way in, there stands - or broods - the strange and imposing memorial in many - coloured marbles to the Revd. Francis Blake Woodward, Chaplain 1850 - 1866. A "Mr. Slater, the Architect" designed it.

Memorial to Revd. Francis Blake Woodward

The great geometrical composition may seem very impersonal, and Christianised only by the sacred letters IHS
which appear in its central roundel. Yet this was the reredos behind the altar in the latter days of our former English Chapel outside the Porta del Popolo. It must have been a nightmare to take apart and store for five years between the demolition of the old chapel and the monument's careful re-erection here in 1892.

It does represent, however, along with the few old pews of 1857/8 still in use, the only item known to have survived from the earlier building, where Anglican worship was offered from 1825 to 1887. (The first Anglican ministrations began still earlier, in 1816, as recounted in the companion History; but these were held in various secular locations borrowed for the purpose).