🇮🇹 Italy · Central Italy (Lazio and Tuscany)
Visiting Vatican City means, in a few square metres, looking into two thousand years of faith, art and power. It is the smallest state in the world, but it holds some of the most extraordinary artistic treasures of humanity: St Peter's Basilica, the largest church in Christendom, raised over the apostle's tomb; the Sistine Chapel, with Michelangelo's breathtaking frescoes; and the Vatican Museums, one of the richest art collections on the planet.
The Vatican is the spiritual heart of more than a billion Catholics around the world and the residence of the Pope, but it is also a destination that moves any traveller, believer or not, by the scale of its art and its history. St Peter's Square, embraced by Bernini's majestic colonnade, is one of the most impressive spaces ever designed, made to welcome crowds of pilgrims.
This guide covers the essentials of the Vatican with a practical, warm eye: how to enter the basilica and climb its dome, how to organise a visit to the Museums and the Sistine Chapel to avoid the long queues, which religious events to experience and how to combine the Vatican with the rest of Rome. One golden tip: book tickets in advance and dress respectfully (shoulders and knees covered), because it is a place of worship.
The Vatican owes its importance to a founding event of Christianity: according to tradition, on the Vatican hill, in the gardens and circus of the emperor Nero, the apostle St Peter, considered the first Pope, was martyred and buried around AD 64 or 67. Over his tomb, the emperor Constantine had a first great basilica built in the 4th century. Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the popes made the Vatican the centre of the Church and of the Papal States, the territory they ruled in central Italy until 1870. The old Constantinian basilica was demolished and replaced, between the 16th and 17th centuries, by the present St Peter's Basilica, in whose construction and decoration Bramante, Michelangelo (author of the dome and the Pietà), Raphael, Maderno and Bernini took part. When in 1870 the Kingdom of Italy took Rome and dissolved the Papal States, the pope considered himself a 'prisoner' in the Vatican, opening the so-called 'Roman question'. The conflict was settled in 1929 with the Lateran Pacts, signed between the Holy See and Mussolini's Italian state, which created the Vatican City State as a sovereign, independent entity. Since then the Vatican has been a city-state governed by the Pope, with its own flag, stamps, guard (the picturesque Swiss Guard) and administration. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Italy: Rome and Lazio, cradle of the Empire and seat of the papacy; the Tuscany of the Etruscans, the communal republics of Siena and Pisa, and Florence, the city that gave the world the Renaissance.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Vatican's importance goes back to imperial Rome in the 1st century. The area, on the right bank of the Tiber, was then a suburban district called the Ager Vaticanus (the Vatican field), thinly populated and reputed to be unhealthy. There the emperor Caligula and then Nero built a circus — the Circus of Nero — for chariot races and shows. Beside the circus, as was Roman custom, lay a necropolis, a cemetery with mausoleums along a road.
It was precisely here that, according to Christian tradition, the apostle St Peter was martyred, regarded by the Catholic Church as the first Pope, during the persecution of Christians unleashed by Nero after the great fire of Rome in the year 64. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down out of humility, not considering himself worthy of dying as Christ did. His body was buried in the nearby necropolis, in a modest grave that the first Christians began to venerate.
Over the following decades and centuries, that grave became a place of clandestine pilgrimage for Christians, who marked it with a small monument. The memory that St Peter lay there was never lost. When, much later, the excavations of the 20th century brought the ancient necropolis beneath the basilica to light, the area of the apostle's supposed tomb was identified: the exact point over which, across the centuries, first Constantine's basilica and then today's St Peter's Basilica would be raised. The whole sacred geography of the Vatican turns on that point.
The great leap in the Vatican's history came with the emperor Constantine, the first to favour Christianity after the Edict of Milan in 313, which ended the persecutions. Around 320-330, Constantine had a great basilica built over St Peter's tomb, known as the Constantinian basilica or 'old St Peter's'. To raise it on that sloping hillside, enormous earthworks were needed, and they buried the ancient Roman necropolis, unknowingly preserving it for posterity.
For more than a thousand years, this first basilica was the main shrine of western Christendom and a pilgrimage destination that drew the faithful from all over Europe. A quarter of hostels, chapels and buildings for pilgrims and clergy grew up around it. The Vatican, however, was not yet the popes' usual residence; for much of the Middle Ages they lived in the Lateran palace, at the other end of Rome.
The Middle Ages were a turbulent time for Rome and the papacy. The city suffered sackings and decline, the popes were caught up in conflicts with emperors and noble families, and at the start of the 14th century the papal seat moved to Avignon, in France, for almost seventy years (the so-called Avignon exile). When the papacy returned definitively to Rome at the end of the 14th century, the pontiffs began to settle beside St Peter's, in the Vatican, which gradually became the centre of papal power. The old Constantinian basilica, badly worn after a thousand years of use, would be the setting for the great Renaissance transformation.
Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the popes turned the Vatican into the greatest artistic showcase in Christendom, calling in the geniuses of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Pope Sixtus IV had the Sistine Chapel (which bears his name) built between 1473 and 1481, its walls painted by Quattrocento masters such as Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio. But the most radical transformation was driven by Pope Julius II at the start of the 16th century.
Julius II took the bold decision to demolish the thousand-year-old Constantinian basilica, which was in danger of collapse, and build in its place an entirely new church, the largest and most magnificent in the world. The first stone was laid in 1506, to a design by Bramante. The work went on for more than a century and involved, in succession, the greatest architects and artists of the age: after Bramante came Raphael, Sangallo and, above all, Michelangelo, who directed the work from 1547 and designed the grand dome. The façade and the nave were completed by Maderno, and the basilica was consecrated in 1626.
It was also Julius II who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512), one of the absolute peaks of world art, and Raphael to decorate the rooms of the Apostolic Palace (the Raphael Rooms, with the famous School of Athens). Decades later, Michelangelo would add the monumental Last Judgement on the Sistine altar wall. In the 17th century, the genius of the Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, shaped the interior of the basilica and designed the majestic St Peter's Square with its colonnade. That is how the artistic Vatican we know today came about, an unrepeatable treasure assembled over generations.
For more than a thousand years, the popes were not only spiritual leaders but also sovereigns of a state: the Papal States, a territory that at its greatest extent covered much of central Italy, from Lazio to Romagna, with Rome as its capital. This temporal power of the papacy, dating back roughly to the 8th century, gave the pontiffs political independence from other monarchs, but it also involved them in wars, alliances and territorial conflicts like any other European prince.
It all went into crisis in the 19th century with the process of Italian unification (the Risorgimento). The new Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in 1861, wanted Rome as its capital, but the city was still the heart of the Papal States, defended by the pope's troops and, for years, by a French garrison sent by Napoleon III. The outcome came on 20 September 1870, when, with the French troops withdrawn because of the Franco-Prussian War, the Italian army breached the wall at Porta Pia and entered Rome. The Papal States ceased to exist.
Pope Pius IX refused to recognise the annexation, shut himself away in the Vatican and declared himself a 'prisoner', refusing to leave the grounds. So began the so-called 'Roman question': a conflict of almost sixty years between the Holy See and the Italian state, during which the popes did not recognise the new kingdom's legitimacy over Rome and remained, symbolically, enclosed in the Vatican. The situation was left in a legal limbo: the papacy had lost its state but kept enormous spiritual and diplomatic weight around the world.
The 'Roman question' that had set the Holy See against the Italian state since 1870 was finally settled on 11 February 1929 with the signing of the Lateran Pacts (Patti Lateranensi), between Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, on behalf of Pope Pius XI, and Benito Mussolini, on behalf of the king of Italy. These agreements ended almost six decades of conflict and reshaped the relationship between Italy and the papacy.
The Pacts created a new subject of international law: the Vatican City State, a tiny territory — barely 0.44 km² — over which the pope would exercise full sovereignty. In this way the Holy See regained the territorial independence needed to guarantee its spiritual freedom, but on a minimal scale, without the claims of the old Papal States. The agreements also included a concordat regulating relations between the Catholic Church and the Italian state, and financial compensation for the loss of the former territories.
Since 1929, Vatican City has been the smallest independent state in the world, governed by the Pope as absolute monarch and head of state. It has its own flag (yellow and white, with the keys of St Peter), anthem, stamps, post office, newspaper (L'Osservatore Romano), radio and, famously, its own security force: the Pontifical Swiss Guard, with its picturesque Renaissance-inspired uniforms. The Vatican is not part of Italy, although it is completely surrounded by Rome and shares many services with the city.
Today Vatican City is at once the smallest state in the world and one of the most influential places on the planet. It is the seat of the Catholic Church and the residence of the Pope, who exercises spiritual authority over more than a billion faithful worldwide and maintains diplomatic relations with most countries. The Holy See, distinct from the Vatican state but tied to it, takes part in international bodies and plays a significant role in world diplomacy.
In 1984, Unesco inscribed Vatican City on its World Heritage list, with the distinction of being the only state in the world listed in its entirety as World Heritage. The recognition covers the extraordinary ensemble formed by St Peter's Basilica, St Peter's Square, the palaces, the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel and the gardens: a unique compendium of art, architecture and spirituality accumulated over the centuries.
The Vatican receives millions of visitors and pilgrims every year, who come to admire its artistic treasures, attend papal audiences and celebrations or take part in special moments such as Holy Years or Jubilees, which multiply the crowds. Its daily running combines the ancient and the modern: the Swiss Guard in their Renaissance uniforms coexist with the technology of the museums, the archives and the Holy See's communications. Despite its tiny size, the Vatican remains a spiritual, cultural and artistic beacon that concentrates, in less than half a square kilometre, an essential part of the history of humanity.