Devil's Chair - Tomb of Elio Callistio

The so-called "Devil's Chair", more properly the Tomb of Elio Callistio, is a funeral architecture of ancient Rome located in Piazza Elio Callistio in the Trieste district in Rome. It stood on a small hill along the ancient Via Nomentana.

The same square was called Piazza della Sedia del Diavolo until the 1950s. Aelius Callistio was a freedman of Hadrian and his tomb is typical of the type of small temple (naiskos) of the first half of the 2nd century AD, comparable to the cenotaph of Annia Regilla on the ancient Appian Way.

The popular name derives from the shape of the ruin, which with the collapse of the facade took the curious shape of a monumental bishop's chair, which ignited the popular imagination, being at the time clearly visible from afar and isolated in the countryside.

Legends, a mixture of cults, folk tales and collective fears have been added to the nights in which vagabonds and shepherds used it as a refuge or as a venue for propitiatory rites, lighting fires inside, and this is how in the imagination it has become and is remained the devil's chair.

We must imagine that in the past it was not dotted with palaces, in the middle of a city turn, but surrounded by large meadows. Its fires could be seen from afar in the Roman countryside and the Middle Ages nurtured a fervid imagination for the occult and the evil one.

 

Map: Devil's Chair - Tomb of Elio Callistio