Honorius I was elevated to the papacy in October 625. In the preceding two decades, following the death of Gregory I in 604, five different men had held the Roman episcopacy. Honorius would serve as the city's bishop for twelve years and eleven months, until October 638, a tenure only seven months short of Gregory’s. For the remainder of the seventh century, only two men surpassed his nearly thirteen years on the papal cathedra (and then just barely). In Honorius's case, time mattered. He inherited a city diminished and in tatters, one that, even now, despite recent re-thinking and new information, remains hard to visualize amid an age so long (considered) ‘dark’. Yet, it is just possible – on the basis of contemporary documentary, epigraphic, literary, and art historical evidence – to see Honorius's episcopacy as a period that laid the foundations for a new instantiation of Christian Rome, one whose Janus-like image not only looked back to the city's fifthcentury heyday of church building and papal imagineering, but also solidified Rome's status as the medieval West's ‘city of saints’ par excellence. If ‘renaissance’ is understood to denote a particularly self-conscious moment of ‘self-reinvention’ through the assimilation and creative transformation of the past – and not simply a movement in which ancient texts and literary forms are recuperated – then Honorian Rome may merit consideration as home to yet another renaissance in a city that, perhaps more than most, had long been deeply committed to curating its past for present purposes.