The Seven Churches of Rome is a devotion measured in a day rather than in weeks, and it took its settled form from one sixteenth-century priest working with a habit that was already old.
The circuit
The devotion visits seven Roman basilicas on foot in one day: Saint Peter, Saint Paul Outside the Walls, Saint John Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Lorenzo, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and San Sebastiano. The circuit is long, well over thirty kilometres, and links the tombs and relics that made Rome the senior pilgrimage of the Latin west, joining the four major basilicas to three lesser ones associated with the martyrs.
Neri systematised an existing habit
Visiting the great basilicas is far older than Filippo Neri, who in the 1550s gave the practice its fixed one-day form rather than inventing it; the four major basilicas were already the object of Jubilee pilgrimage from 1300. What Neri added was the single-day circuit walked in company with music, food and prayer, which turned a diffuse devotional habit into a defined route. It remains associated with him and with the Oratory he founded, and it is walked again in Holy Years.