"
We will only add to our correspondent's account the fact that the Basilica
of St. Stephen had been sought for in vain previously to this discovery by
Signor Fortunati. The great explorer, Bosio, failed to find it, and
Aringhi, writing just two hundred years ago, says, "Formerly upon the Via
Latina stood the church erected with great pains in honor of the most
blessed Stephen, the first martyr, by Demetria, a woman of pristine piety;
of which the Bibliothecarius, in his account of Pope Leo the First, thus
makes mention: 'In these days, Demetria, the handmaid of God, made the
Basilica of St. Stephen on the Latin Way, at the third mile-stone, on her
estate:... which afterward, being decayed and near to ruin through the
long course of years, was restored by Pope Leo the Third.' Of this most
noble church, which was one of the chief monuments of the Christian
religion, as well as an ornament of the city of Rome, no vestige at this
day remains."
It is remarkable that a church restored so late as the time of Leo III.
[A.D. 795-816] should have been so lost without being utterly destroyed,
and so buried under the slowly-accumulating soil of the Campagna, that the
very tradition of the existence of its remains should have disappeared,
and its discovery have been the result of scientific archaeeological
investigation.
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