St Peter's Basilica

Church · Vatican CityRome,Italy

The largest church ever built, raised in Rome over a grave held to be the apostle Peter's, with Michelangelo's dome and Bernini's bronze canopy.

St Peter's Basilica is the largest church ever built, and the scale is what hits you before anything else: the nave runs so long and so evenly proportioned that distant figures look nearer than they are. Light falls from the dome onto Bernini's twisting bronze canopy over the papal altar. Michelangelo's Pietà stands behind glass near the door, and a slow, constant line of pilgrims files past a seated bronze St Peter with a worn foot. Marks in the floor show where other cathedrals would end. The church stands on Vatican Hill over a Roman necropolis, where early Christians marked a grave they believed held the apostle Peter, crucified nearby under Nero. Constantine raised a first church here in the fourth century; by 1506 it was crumbling, and Julius II had it pulled down and begun again. Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo and Maderno each redrew what rose, which took more than a century. It is still the ceremonial heart of the Catholic Church, where popes are mourned, chosen and buried under the floor you cross, and shoulders and knees must be covered to go in.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look up at the gold letters ringing the dome's base — From the floor they read as ordinary script; each is actually taller than a standing person.
Study Bernini's spiralling columns closely — bronze bees and laurel climb the twisting shafts, the private emblem of the Barberini pope who paid for them.
Find the round red porphyry disc in the floor near the central door — Emperors once knelt on it to be crowned; it was lifted from the old basilica and kept.
Everyone starts in the security line, not at the doors — the police checks sit in the right-hand arm of the colonnade, and the queue for them runs back across the square.
The dome is booked apart from the church — it has its own time slot, and the lift stops at the roof terrace, so the last climb between the two shells is on foot.

Things to do

1
Pace the floor lines up the nave
Start at the bronze doors and walk slowly up the centre of the nave, watching for the brass lines set into the marble floor. Each marks where a famous cathedral elsewhere would end. Notice how far you keep walking past every one before you finally reach the altar.
2
Climb between the dome's two shells
Climb first to the interior gallery, where the floor drops dizzyingly away and the mosaic saints loom close. Then take the narrowing, curving stairwell squeezed between the dome's inner and outer shells up to the lantern, where Rome opens out over the colonnade and the river beyond.
3
Find the Pietà before the crowd
Turn right just inside the entrance to reach the Pietà. Arrive early, before people thicken at the glass, and stand a moment with the polished folds of Mary's robe and the slack weight of Christ's arm. Then look for the signature carved across the band on her chest.
4
Touch the worn bronze foot
Walk to the seated bronze statue of St Peter along the nave's right side and look at its extended right foot, rubbed almost flat. Join the quiet line, rest your palm where millions of hands and lips have passed, and feel how ritual, repeated long enough, wears metal smooth.