Bernini's piazza, Michelangelo's dome and the tombs of the popes: the basilica at the heart of the Catholic world, with the square that opens before it and the hidden levels beneath.
Last updated August 23, 2026
In a nutshell: St Peter's is the largest church in Christendom and the heart of the Catholic world: Bernini's piazza and colonnades, Michelangelo's dome and Pietà, the bronze baldachin over the papal altar, the tombs of the popes in the grottoes below and the chance to see the pope himself in the square. The Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel lie a few minutes away, Borgo and Prati surround the district with food and calm, and the district overview ties the whole area together.
The piazza before the basilica is enormous: 320m at its widest, 240m at its longest. From the air it reads as a giant keyhole, an immense ellipse that narrows to pour pilgrims into the church. Gian Lorenzo Bernini directed the works from 1656 to 1667 and conceived the two curving colonnades that cradle the square, which he likened to a mother's outstretched arms. Each arm is columns four deep in the Doric order, 284 in all, crowned by 140 statues of saints. A fountain stands at each end of the ellipse, and in the middle rises the Vatican Obelisk; Pliny the Elder claimed it came from Heliopolis in Egypt and that Emperor Caligula shipped it to Rome in 40 CE.
Tip: Bernini planted an optical trick here. Walk to the piazza's centre, find the two round plates engraved 'Centro del colonnato', and stand on one: the four ranks of columns line up perfectly and seem to fuse into a single row.
The piazza ranks among Rome's liveliest junctions, with tourists, pilgrims, Vatican staff and police swirling together. At Christmastime a tall tree goes up before the basilica, ringed by a crib scene, a practice launched in the 1980s under Pope John Paul II.
Just beyond the piazza, Via della Conciliazione runs directly towards the Tiber as the Vatican's ceremonial approach, conceived as a symbolic bridge joining the Italian Republic and the Holy See. The project provoked sharp criticism, for it required sweeping away nearly the entire quarter on the site, including the Spina di Borgo - a row of buildings stretching from Castel Sant'Angelo to the square that had concealed the basilica until the last step. Only the dome had always remained in view: no Roman structure has ever risen above it.
Spotting the pope calls for a little organisation, though less than imagined. The thriftiest option asks only for patience: the Angelus, recited in St Peter's Square each Sunday at noon. Appearing at the study window in the Apostolic Palace, the pontiff addresses the throng, recites the prayer and bestows his benediction.
Papal Masses are kept for great occasions - chiefly Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, Palm Sunday and a new pope's enthronement - and demand is fierce, so reserve well ahead. Full information is posted on the Vatican website (vatican.va/various/prefettura/index_en.html).
Papal audiences typically take place on Wednesday mornings, outdoors in St Peter's Square when the sky cooperates and otherwise in the Aula delle Udienze Pontificie Paolo VI. Attendance requires reserving well ahead with the Prefecture of the Papal Household.
Probably the best-known church on the planet and surely the most dazzling in any city, indeed in any country, full of them. Every corner holds masterpieces: Michelangelo's Pietà, Bernini's bronze baldachin, the papal tombs, the giant bronze statue of St Peter and the dome that has shaped Rome's skyline for ages. Opening hours and entry prices are published on the official site (basilicasanpietro.va).
Tip: Dress for church: shoulders and knees must be covered or you will be stopped at the entrance. Entry involves a security check, and the queues, though inevitable, tend to move fast. Lines shrink around lunchtime and again towards evening.
The backstory: a first basilica, reportedly raised at Emperor Constantine's bidding, occupied this spot from about the dawn of the 4th century, on the ground where St Peter was thought to have met his death. By the 14th century the ancient church was derelict and replacement plans circulated, yet building began only in 1506, in the days of Julius II, and ran until consecration in 1626 under Urban VIII. Bramante's blueprint envisioned a Greek cross crowned by an enormous central dome; his death in 1514 froze the works while architects, Raphael included, wrangled over the way forward. Michelangelo took charge in 1547, trimmed the plan and devised the cupola, but he too never saw it rise - hardly a surprise, since he was past seventy. Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana brought the cupola to completion, while Carlo Maderno fashioned the monumental facade.
The facade, the church's final addition, rose between 1608 and 1612 and answers the building's vast scale: 115m across, 48m tall. Eight towering columns bear the attic storey, where figures of Christ the Redeemer, John the Baptist and the apostles (St Peter alone excluded) stand sentinel. The entablature carries the inscription 'IN HONOREM PRINCIPIS APOST PAVLVS V BVRGHESIVS ROMANVS PONT MAX AN MDCXII PONT VII', honouring Pope Paul V Borghese in the seventh year of his reign. Above the main door, the Loggia della Benedizione is the balcony from which a freshly elected pope is announced to the square after the Conclave and from which he delivers the Urbi et Orbi at Easter and Christmas.
From the central nave rises one of Bernini's masterpieces, the baldachin above the papal altar, known as the Altar of the Confession. The canopy stands 20m tall on four spiral columns, cast from bronze stripped from the Pantheon - a monument of Italian baroque in every sense. Glance down at the floor on your way: inlaid markers record the lengths of the world's great Catholic churches, every one of them dwarfed by this building. Beyond the altar, the Cattedra di San Pietro (Chair of St Peter) completes Bernini's triumph - a gilded bronze seat long held to be St Peter's own, borne by four towering saints and illuminated by a golden window framed by angels and the Holy Spirit's white dove.
The four colossal piers bearing the dome ring the baldachin. Against one pier's base stands Arnolfo di Cambio's bronze St Peter, cast in the 13th century and cherished by countless pilgrims, whose caresses over the centuries have polished the statue's right foot smooth.
Bernini's final work within the basilica, the funerary monument of Alexander VII, stands left of the baldachin. The pontiff kneels upon a drape of red marble while a skeleton claws its way out beneath him, holding an hourglass that recalls the relentless march of time. Monuments to over 250 popes of the Catholic Church crowd the building. Farther along the left aisle, the Cappella Clementina, built for Pope Clement VIII's Jubilee of 1600, shelters the tomb of St Gregory the Great and a memorial to Pius VII, while the arch leading to the neighbouring chapel carries a memorial to Leo XI. Past the Cappella del Coro (by Giovanni Battista Ricci) come memorials to Innocent VIII and, in the Cappella della Presentazione, black reliefs honouring John XXIII and Benedict XV. Hard by the doorway at the left, Antonio Canova's Stuart Monument commemorates the House of Stuart, driven from the British throne and long branded pretenders.
The entrance is along the left aisle. The museum guards the Tesoro della Basilica, the holy relics and treasures handed down from pope to pope: a Donatello tabernacle, the Crux Vaticana, a cross studded with jewels given to the basilica by Justinian II in the 6th century, and a collection of chandeliers, crosses and rings of past popes, all of which passed into the Holy See's possession over the centuries.
On entering, turn right and you meet one of Michelangelo's most renowned creations: La Pietà (1498-99), in which the Virgin Mary cradles the body of Jesus lowered from the cross - the single piece Michelangelo ever signed, his name running along the sash across Mary's breast. Bulletproof glass has shielded it since a hammer attack in the 1970s; restorers revived the statue using the many photographs and casts that recorded it. Nearby, a big red disc set in the paving marks the site of Charlemagne's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800. As you head for the altar you pass the Cappella di San Sebastiano (with John Paul II's tomb) and then the Cappella del Santissimo Sacramento, embellished by Borromini, Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. Next to the Cappella Gregoriana, whose design is Michelangelo's, rises the imposing monument to Gregory XIII.
Michelangelo based his cupola on Brunelleschi's for Florence's Duomo; the finished shell climbs to 199m. Its four supporting piers bear the names of saints housed in their niches, each linked to a basilica relic: St Longinus, whose spear opened Christ's side; St Veronica, with the cloth with which she wiped his face on the road to Calvary; St Helena, credited with bringing a splinter of the True Cross back to Rome; and St Andrew, whose head reposes here.
You can make the climb yourself: the ticket desk sits at the main portico's right-hand end, and the ascent begins there. Count on 320 tight steps overall, though a small elevator covers half the route - welcome news for anyone prone to claustrophobia or bouts of vertigo; the payoff, on a clear day, is a magnificent panorama from the summit.
If you do not mind confined spaces, the grottoes repay a visit. The free entrance lies beneath the pier of St Andrew - easy to spot, since a queue usually forms for it. Steps lead 3m below the basilica to halls packed with the sarcophagi and tombs of numerous popes, from the earliest days of Christianity to modern times. You will also see pillars from the original 4th-century church, for the grottoes fill the gap between the ancient basilica and the present one. The walk ends outdoors, along one flank of the church, so save the grottoes for the end of your visit to St Peter's.
Attending Mass: beyond its artistic riches, the basilica functions as a live church, with daily Masses in its chapels. Schedules for services and other celebrations appear at basilicasanpietro.va/en.html.
Centuries before Bernini arranged this space, the ground beneath your feet belonged to Nero's Circus, an elongated chariot track shaped like a cigar. There were no marching bands in Rome, so the half-time entertainment was the killing of Christians: some were thrown to wild beasts or gladiators, some were crucified, others were smeared with tar, lashed to stakes and set ablaze as living torches for the evening races.
One of those executed here, around 65 CE, was Peter, the disciple Jesus had nicknamed the Rock. Peter brought the message of love to Rome, and when the sentence came he begged to be crucified head down, declaring himself unworthy to die the same way as his master. His body was laid in a cemetery where the main altar now stands, and for 250 years Christians venerated the grave in secret.
The obelisk that now marks the centre of the square is a single shaft of granite, 90 feet tall and weighing more than 300 tons. Its original position lay about a hundred yards from here, at the middle of the racetrack. Raised in Egypt more than two thousand years ago, it saw dynasties of pharaohs topple, the Greeks arrive, the Romans follow; Emperor Caligula finally hauled it off to his circus in Rome. From there it silently watched Christians being killed at the races and, in the ochre building that stands just beyond the piazza, left of the church, the tortures of the Inquisition. The small cross on its summit reads almost as an afterthought, a reminder that this civilisation rests on older, pagan foundations.
Bernini's square is a giant ellipse, roughly the dimensions of the Colosseum, and it is built like a saucer: the rim sits a little higher than the centre, so that even when the piazza is packed, people at the back can still see over the crowd.
Just right of the church facade stands the Sistine Chapel, the grey-brown building capped by a triangular roof and an antenna on top; the chapel itself is the finale of the Vatican Museums. Watch the stubby chimney on its roofline: when a pontiff dies or steps down, the cardinals gather inside for the conclave, a word from the Latin for 'with a key'. Their phones taken away and a vow of secrecy sworn, they are sealed in and burn their ballot papers in a stove, and for the occasion a temporary extension is bolted to the chimney. White smoke signals a new pontiff; black smoke means the two-thirds majority has not yet been reached.
Facing the church, look right, past the colonnade, to the grey palace on the skyline. Its top floor holds the papal apartment: the rightmost window belongs to the pope's bedroom, with the study window just to its left. Francis, however, chose to live in a modest guesthouse; when he first saw the grand state rooms he reportedly said you could fit three hundred people in there.
The entrance portico alone would qualify as a church in its own right; its massive white columns come from the fourth-century basilica that preceded this one. Five celebrated bronze doors lead inside. The central door was cast from the bronze of Old St Peter's own door, melted down and reworked, and is Rome's first Renaissance work, dating from around 1450; it opens only on grand occasions. Its panels show Jesus and Mary, then Peter and Paul, and finally the manner of each apostle's death, Paul losing his head and Peter nailed to the cross head downwards.
The door at the far right is the Holy Door, opened only in Holy Years and the special jubilees the pope declares. On Christmas Eve of a jubilee year he taps it three times using a silver hammer, and pilgrims stream through. John Paul II opened it for the year 2000 and sealed it again with a trowel in a brief ceremony twelve months later; the plaque above records his name, the year MM in which it opened and the year MMI in which it closed. Francis reopened it for the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2016.
Pause beside the entrance doors and let the scale of the place hit you: the gilded window at the distant end of the hall is as remote as two football pitches laid end to end, and the dove in its frame spreads wings nearly as wide as a jumbo jet. The building covers six acres and can hold 60,000 standing worshippers. The infants carved around the pillar bases along the nave are full adult size, and the lettering in the gilded band high on the piers is seven feet tall. Along the floor, brass plaques show how far the world's great churches would stretch if dropped inside: St Paul's in London, the Duomo of Florence and their peers all fall far short.
Everything in this interior is engineered to make the immensity feel cosier. The statue of St Teresa beside the first right-hand pillar stands 15 feet tall, while the figure above it looks the same size yet is six feet taller, an illusion that shrinks the distances. The great bronze baldachin over the altar rises as high as a seven-storey building, which in turn makes the dome above seem less dizzying.
The floor plan, a central hall flanked by aisles, copies the ancient Roman basilicas that housed courts and commerce, and much of the stone was scavenged from those ruined law courts. The popes paid for it all with indulgences, the sale of forgiveness that so enraged Martin Luther and helped ignite the Reformation; the extravagant interior, thick with marble, gold and mosaic, was the Church's Counter-Reformation answer, baroque propaganda meant to overwhelm and impress.
Midway to the altar, stop at the second circular grate of gilded bronze let into the floor, at the third column in from the door. It marks the limit of Michelangelo's original Greek-cross plan: everything between here and the entrance is the nave grafted on after his death. Had he won the argument, this whole long hall would not exist.
The white marble altar beneath the dome is reserved for the pope's own celebrations; he sometimes says the Sunday morning Mass there when he is in town. Without Bernini's canopy it would vanish in this vastness. The baldachin, which Bernini liked to call God's four-poster bed, rises seven storeys on four corkscrew columns that echo the twisted marble columns that ringed the tomb in Old St Peter's, and much of its bronze was taken from the Pantheon's porch and melted down. Look at the column bases: the Barberini bees on a shield mark the family that commissioned the work, and above them Bernini carved a sequence of female faces showing the stages of childbirth, because a Barberini matron was pregnant while the canopy was being made. Walk on to the final base and the sequence resolves itself.
Bernini's fingerprints cover almost everything here. His greatest hits:
Deep in the eastern apse, Bernini's dove window glows: the Holy Spirit appears as a dove six feet across, and light spills through the alabaster panes to reflect off gilded clouds, angels and cherubs. Because this church fronts west instead of the customary east, the low sun pours through it as the day closes, when real light mingles with incense during Mass. The Throne of St Peter beneath it began life as a medieval oak chair built for a king; Bernini sheathed it in bronze and raised it above four Church Fathers as a monument to papal authority.
Standing beneath the cupola is the moment the whole church has been building towards. The interior soars 448 feet from the floor up to the lantern's crown, glowing with mosaics in blue and gold that shimmer in the window light. Above the windows sit Jesus, Mary and a circle of saints, with rings of angels above them and, at the very summit, a faraway smudge of colour that is God the Father. When Michelangelo died in 1564 he had finished only the drum, the circular base up to the windows; his successors carried on from his drawings. Around the base runs a gold banner with giant blue lettering, the words Jesus spoke to Peter when he named him the rock on which his church would be built; all the words Jesus addresses to Peter in scripture are spelled out around the church in letters seven feet tall.
Michelangelo was 24 when he finished the Pietà, his first major commission, ordered by the French ambassador for the Holy Year of 1500. The word means 'pity', and the sculpture is a study in grief: Mary cradles her dead son, whose right arm hangs limp and heavy with the weight of the body; her robes fall in rough folds against his smooth skin; her head bends towards him and her left hand opens upward, as if asking how they could have done this to him. Life-size Christ looks almost childlike in the lap of the larger-than-life Mary, and Mary herself seems a teenager though she would have been near 50; the exaggerations stress the mother's embrace and her eternal youth as the Lord's handmaiden.
This is the only work Michelangelo ever signed. Legend has it that he overheard pilgrims admiring the statue while crediting it to a lesser sculptor from another city; furious, he fetched his chisel and carved his name into the band across Mary's chest. In 1972 a man with a hammer attacked the statue, and although the damage was repaired, the Pietà has sat behind bulletproof glass ever since.
Back towards the entrance, along the nave's right flank, a bronze St Peter sits enthroned beneath a canopy. He grips the keys of heaven in one hand and blesses the assembled pilgrims with the other, wearing a senator's toga; scholars suspect the figure may originally have been a senator, with the bearded head and the keys added later to turn him into the apostle. Pilgrims queue to kiss his right foot, worn smooth by centuries of such devotion; if the statue is roped off, touch your fingers to your lips and then rub the toe.
Near the statue of Peter, in a glass niche on the right, lies Pope John XXIII, 'the good pope' of 1958 to 1963, who convened the Second Vatican Council and allowed Mass to be said in everyday language. When his body was examined in 2000, during the beatification process, it was found remarkably well preserved, so he was brought up from the crypt and put on display behind glass; in 2014 he and John Paul II were canonised together. John Paul II's tomb nearby is deliberately plain: a stone slab inscribed 'Ioannes Paulus PP. II (1920-2005)' beneath a painting of St Sebastian, the martyr who was his favourite saint. The first non-Italian pontiff in 400 years, he travelled tirelessly and lived through an assassination attempt, and when he died in 2005 hundreds of thousands queued for up to a day to file past his body; he was canonised barely nine years later.
In the south transept, beyond the main altar, a dark panel marks the traditional spot of Peter's execution, where tradition says he was killed almost nineteen hundred years ago. Like every other 'painting' in the church, it is actually a mosaic built from thousands of chips the size of a fingernail: smoke and humidity would destroy real canvases, so since the 1700s the Vatican Mosaic Studio has turned out these copies. Near the exit hangs the mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration; the original now hangs in the picture gallery of the Vatican Museums.
The best panorama in Rome is the reward at the summit of the cupola, and the climb makes a fitting end to the visit. The lift entrance is on the church's northern flank; the ticket office and the stairway entrance are usually on the left, though the two occasionally swap positions, so follow the cupola signs. The ticket is €8 for the full staircase, or €10 to ride the lift to the roof and continue on foot; cash only.
The first stage, by lift or by 231 stairs, lands you on the rooftop above the facade. The square spreads out below with the saints parading along Bernini's colonnade, Rome stretches away across the Tiber, and the dome looms behind, almost frighteningly close. You can also step into the gallery that rings the inside of the cupola and gaze down into the church: the top of the great canopy far below is dusty, the mosaics and their giant letters are suddenly within arm's reach, and it is worth the lift fare for this view alone.
The last stretch is 323 steps winding between the inner and outer shells of the dome: a sweaty, crowded, claustrophobic quarter of an hour. The summit repays it. From the lantern you look down on Bernini's colonnade embracing the square, pick out the huge pale Victor Emmanuel Monument with its two bronze chariots, and the Pantheon's low, light dome; to one side lies the long block of the Vatican Museums, and behind it the Vatican's gardens and miniature railway. The pilgrims far below swarm the square like electrons circling a nucleus of faith.
Beneath the basilica lie the ruins of the old church, and beneath that, in the earth, the grave of Peter himself. The crypt, known as the grottoes, is free and takes about fifteen minutes to walk. In summer the entrance opens next to the statue of St Andrew, on the high altar's left; in winter it moves over to the dome entrance. Steps drop to the level where the fourth-century church once stood, where a lighted niche holding an icon marks the shrine that stands above Peter's tomb, which is not itself visible. The route passes the tombs of many popes, among them Paul VI (1897-1978), a traditionalist who watched the Church modernise around him, and fragments of columns from Old St Peter's. The one-way walk finishes near the cloakroom or outside the church, so save it until the end of your visit.
The Peter of the gospels was a fisherman from Galilee whom Jesus nicknamed the Rock, in Latin Petrus, and chose despite his flaws: he once tried walking on the lake and went under, cut off a man's ear when the soldiers came for Jesus, and denied knowing his master three times. After the crucifixion he carried the message of love to Rome, the wicked city, and met his death here.
The story of the bones: the grave was sealed when Old St Peter's rose over it in 326 and stayed sealed until 1940, when archaeologists opened it. They found the skeleton of a sturdy man who had lived to old age, wrapped in costly cloth and dating from the first century; on a nearby wall a third-century visitor had scratched 'Peter is here'. Whether these are truly the apostle's remains, the Church answers with a confident maybe.
To stand at the actual tomb you need the Scavi tour, which descends into the burial grounds beneath the basilica: €13, ninety minutes, and open only to visitors aged 12 and over. Reserve at least two months ahead by emailing [email protected] or through the excavations office at scavi.va; if you receive no reply, the tours are fully booked.
One odd detail above ground: sight along the cross on the high altar to the dove set in the window, and the niche beneath the cross sits slightly out of true with the building around it. Michelangelo built to the tradition's version of the grave site, which archaeology places a couple of feet from the real one.
Back inside, at the railing before the high altar, you can peer down into a small lighted niche holding a box of bishops' shawls, a sign that Peter's authority passed on to other churches; his tomb lies just below, some 23 feet under the marble floor.
The crypt holds the remains of most of the popes, close to Peter's tomb; the most beloved, like John XXIII and John Paul II, have since been moved upstairs into the basilica itself.
St Peter's is a working church first and a sight second. Mass is celebrated daily, usually in Italian, in the southern transept, in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament on the nave's right side, or at the high altar; check the signboard at the entrance for the day's schedule. The main altar is reserved for the pope, who sometimes says Sunday Mass there when he is in Rome. The Blessed Sacrament Chapel, about midway along the right side, is an oasis of quiet given over to prayer, and Mass is occasionally said there too.
Confession is heard in the wooden booths of the north transept, beside the high altar, usually in the mornings and late afternoons. Note that on Wednesday mornings the papal audience takes over the square and the basilica stays shut until about 13:00.