St Peter's Basilica

The stops run from the square, through the door and up the nave, down to the tombs and then up to the dome.

1. The square: two arms and an obelisk

Bernini built the square between 1656 and 1667. The two curved colonnades have 284 columns in four rows, with 140 statues of saints along the top. He said they were the arms of the Church reaching out to gather people in.

Between the obelisk and each fountain, find a round stone in the pavement. Stand on it and look at the nearer colonnade. The four rows of columns line up and look like one.

The obelisk is Egyptian and has no writing on it. The emperor Caligula brought it to Rome in AD 37 for his racecourse, the one where Peter died. It is the only obelisk in Rome that never fell. In 1586 it was moved 250 metres to this spot by 900 men and 140 horses.

2. The front and the Holy Door

Michelangelo planned a church in the shape of a cross with four equal arms, so that the dome would rule the whole. After his death the nave was made longer, and the wide front of 1614 was put across it. That is why, from the square, the front hides most of the dome.

Of the five doors, the one on the far right is the Holy Door. It is bricked up from inside and opened only in a jubilee year, usually every twenty-five years. Pope Francis opened it on 24 December 2024. Pope Leo XIV closed it on 6 January 2026.

3. The Pietà

A French cardinal ordered it for his own tomb in 1498. Michelangelo promised him the most beautiful work in marble in Rome, and finished it in a year. Mary looks younger than her son. Asked why, he said that purity keeps a woman young.

It is the only work he signed. The letters run along the band across Mary's chest.

In 1972 a man climbed the rail and struck it fifteen times with a hammer, breaking the nose and the left arm. It was mended with the fragments and has been behind glass ever since.

4. The nave: how big is big

The church does not look its size, because everything in it is scaled up together. The cherubs holding the holy-water basins by the door are two metres tall. The letters of the inscription round the top of the walls are as tall as a man.

Look down along the middle of the floor. Brass marks show where other great churches would end if they were set inside this one: St Paul's in London, the cathedrals of Florence and Milan, and others. None reaches the far wall.

On the right near the crossing sits a bronze Saint Peter of about 1300. Pilgrims touch or kiss his right foot as they pass. Seven centuries of hands have worn the toes smooth.

5. The canopy and the chair

Over the high altar stands Bernini's canopy of bronze, 29 metres tall, on four twisted columns. He was 25 when he began it in 1624. Only the Pope says Mass at this altar.

Part of the bronze came from the beams of the porch of the Pantheon, the best-preserved temple of ancient Rome. The pope who ordered this was a Barberini. Romans said that what the barbarians had not done, the Barberini did.

At the very end of the church, four bronze figures hold up a great bronze chair, which encloses an old wooden one long believed to be Peter's own. Above it a dove flies in a window of thin yellow stone. Come in the late afternoon, when the sun is behind it.

6. Below the floor: the grottoes and the grave

Stairs near the crossing lead down to the level of Constantine's church. Popes are buried here, among them Benedict XVI, who died in 2022. Pope Francis, who died in April 2025, chose to be buried in another church across Rome.

Lower still is a street of Roman tombs, dug out in the 1940s. At its end, directly under the high altar, the diggers found a small shrine of about AD 160 built against a red wall, and bones in a niche beside it. In 1968 Pope Paul VI said that they had been identified as Peter's in a way he held to be convincing. Not all scholars agree.

That lowest level is seen only on a guided visit in a small group, asked for well in advance on the basilica's site.

7. The dome

Michelangelo studied the dome of Florence cathedral and the Pantheon, and made his own of two shells, one inside the other, held by iron chains. He died in 1564 with only the drum built. It was finished in 1590, slightly taller and more pointed than he had drawn it.

It is 42 metres across, a little less than the Pantheon. Round its base, in letters two metres high, are the words Christ spoke to Peter: you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.

The way up is 551 steps, or a lift to the roof and then 320 steps. The last stretch runs between the two shells and leans with the curve. At the top you look down on the square and across all of Rome.

8. The price, and the same years in China

To pay for the building, Pope Leo X sold indulgences across Europe: certificates that were said to shorten a soul's time of punishment after death. In 1517 Martin Luther, by then a professor in Germany, published ninety-five objections. Within a generation half of Europe had left the Roman Church.

When the first stone was laid in 1506, the Zhengde Emperor had just come to the throne of the Ming (1368–1644). The Forbidden City in Beijing was then 86 years old.

When the church was consecrated in 1626, the Ming had eighteen years left. In that year the Manchu leader Nurhaci died of wounds after failing to take a Ming fortress. The Jesuit Adam Schall, who had left Rome a few years before, was in China, where he would later run the imperial observatory.