Catacombs on Rome

following this thread.

I was only once in Rome and visited only one catacomb, so can't say which are the best, but I was very satisfied with visiting the St. Agnes Catacombs. It's quite small compared to the others, but I liked that it was not crowded at all when I visited it in March. You can see it only on a short guided tour and we were only less than 10 of us(mostly Italian tourists), the tour was in Italian but the guide did her best to to summerise it briefly in English and the tour also includes the Santa Costanza church which is one of the most ancient of Rome. When I was there in 2011, you didn't have to book the tour, but perhaps that has changed since than.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Costanza

We have visited one catacomb off of the Appian Way. We were not allow to visit by ourselves so took an English speaking tour offered by the site. It was very good. Since we only visitrd one I don't know to compare but assume that catacombs are catacombs. I would do it on Sunday when the traffic on the Appian Way is severely restricted. As I remember there two catacombs off the Appian Way and one was closed on Sunday and the other was closed on Monday.

We did San Sebastiano on the Appia Antica and enjoyed it except that the guide was a bit too heavy on the Christian religious end. It contains both pagan Roman and Christian burials, and I'll raise an eyebrow regarding the claimed, temporary burial of a couple of famous names which has not been proven.

But for non-pilgrims like us, they are a very interesting look at funerary traditions/decorations of an era and the reasons why/where these subterranean cemeteries came about.

You can't do any catacomb without a paid tour (those are provided at the sites) so your choice can be up to which one is most convenient to other activities you'll be doing that day. Do be aware that you won't see remains: out of respect of the deceased (these are considered holy sites) those have all been removed from opened tombs along the tourist routes.