Calle San Alejandro

The name evokes Saint Alexander, one of the oldest and haziest figures of the Roman calendar of saints. Tradition tells him as Alexander I, fifth successor of Peter at the head of the Church of Rome in the early second century. The little that survives soon mixes with legend: the accounts of his death by beheading on the Via Nomentana are now held to be fabricated, and scholars suspect that the pope and the Nomentana martyr were in fact two different people the calendar ended up merging into one. Why this stretch of the Imperial neighborhood came under his patronage has not survived in any documented form. The street belongs to an area of Arganzuela whose directory filled with saints, and San Alejandro entered that roster without the municipal records explaining the choice. Barely a hundred and thirty long meters: a short street a visitor crosses without noticing it bears the name of a bishop of Rome whose biography fits almost entirely in a handful of uncertain lines.