"Here is buried a pilgrim from Thrace, whose name is known only to God." The tale is simple and touching. A pilgrim on his way to Rome, or back to his country, was overtaken by death at Chiusi, before he could make himself known to those who had come to his help. They could only suppose he had come from Thrace, the country of the Cicones, possibly from the language he spoke, or from the costume he wore. On May 31, 1578, a workman, while digging a sandpit in the vineyard of Bartolomeo Sanchez at the second milestone of the Via Salaria, came upon a Christian cemetery containing frescoes, sarcophagi, and inscriptions. This unexpected discovery created a great sensation,[153] and the report was circulated that an underground city had been found. The leading men of the age hastened to the spot; among them Baronius, who speaks of these wondrous crypts three or four times in his annals.[154] It seems that the network of galleries, crossing one another at various angles, the skylights, the wells, the symmetry of the cubiculi and arcosolia, the number of loculi with which the sides of the galleries were honeycombed, affected the imagination of visitors even more than the pictures, the sarcophagi, and the epitaphs. The subjects of the frescoes were so varied as to contain almost the whole cycle of early Christian symbolism. There were the Good Shepherd and the Praying Soul, Noah and the ark, Daniel and the lions, Moses striking the rock, the story of Jonah, the sacrifice of Isaac, the three men in the fiery furnace, the resurrection of Lazarus, etc. The bas-reliefs of the marble coffins represented Christian love-feasts and pastoral scenes. The epitaphs contained simply names, except one, which was raised by a girl "to her sweet nurse Paulina, who dwells in Christ among the blessed." These pious memorials of the primitive church led the learned visitors to investigate their meaning and value, as well as the history and name of those mysterious labyrinths. The origin of Christian archæology, therefore, really dates from May 1, 1578. Antonio Bosio, the Columbus of subterranean Rome, was but three years old at that time, but he seems to have developed his marvellous instinct on the strength of what he saw in the Vigna Sanchez in his boyhood. The crypts, however, had but a short life: the quarry-men damaged and robbed them to such an extent that, when Bosio began his career in 1593, every trace of them had disappeared. They have never been found since. We can only point out to the lover of these studies the site of the Vigna Sanchez. It is marked by a monumental gate, on the right side of the Via Salaria, crowned by the well-known coat-of-arms of the della Rovere family, to whom the property was sold towards the end of the sixteenth century. The gate is a little more than a mile from the Porta Salaria.