Before there was a basilica, museums or a state, the Vatican hill was open ground across the Tiber, outside the walls of Rome, taken up by imperial gardens, a circus and a necropolis. There, in the circus begun by Caligula and Nero, tradition places one of the founding episodes of Christianity: the martyrdom of the apostle Peter, whom Catholics regard as the first pope, during the persecution Nero unleashed after the great fire of Rome in the year 64.
Ancient accounts say Peter was crucified around the year 64 or 67 and asked to be nailed upside down because he did not consider himself worthy of dying as Jesus had. His followers are said to have buried him nearby, in the necropolis next to the circus, in a humble grave that was eventually marked by a small monument. That spot (a poor burial beside a red-painted wall) would become the exact geographical centre of everything that came after: the basilica was built, quite literally, around that tomb.
A point of precision is in order: Peter's martyrdom in Rome is attested by early Christian sources, but the specific details belong to tradition rather than to documented record. Archaeological excavations carried out beneath the basilica between 1940 and 1949 uncovered the Roman necropolis and a group of tombs consistent with the account; in 1968, Paul VI announced that remains had been identified which the Holy See considers to be Peter's, although some specialists still have reservations. What is beyond dispute, faith aside, is that the belief that Peter lies beneath that altar shaped two millennia of history on this spot.
Christianity stopped being persecuted when Emperor Constantine, after the Edict of Milan in 313, set about favouring it. Around 320, Constantine ordered a great basilica to be raised on the Vatican hill to honour Peter's tomb. The project was enormous for its time: part of the pagan necropolis had to be razed and the hillside levelled, burying tombs that would not be seen again until the 20th century, so that the altar would sit directly above the venerated grave.
The so-called Old St. Peter's Basilica, or Constantinian basilica, was a five-aisled building with an atrium and monumental proportions; it was probably finished around the middle of the 4th century. For more than a thousand years it was one of the main pilgrimage centres of Christendom: emperors were crowned there (Charlemagne on Christmas Day in the year 800), popes were buried there, and relics, mosaics and donations from all over Europe piled up inside.
By the Renaissance, however, that thousand-year-old building was on the verge of collapse: the walls were leaning and the structures were giving way. That physical decline, together with the artistic ambition of the 16th-century popes, led to a decision as bold as it was controversial: to demolish Constantine's basilica and build a new one in its place, the one we know today. Old St. Peter's was torn down in stages over the course of a century; its last remains came down around 1605.
For centuries, the bishop of Rome was not just a spiritual authority: he was also a sovereign who governed lands, collected taxes and waged wars. The origin of that temporal power is usually dated to 756, when the Frankish king Pepin the Short, after defeating the Lombards, handed the pope a group of territories in central Italy. This 'Donation of Pepin' was the legal basis of the Papal States, which at their greatest extent covered much of central Italy, from Lazio to Ravenna.
During the Middle Ages a famous document also circulated, the 'Donation of Constantine', according to which the emperor had supposedly granted the pope authority over the West. In the 15th century, the humanist Lorenzo Valla used philological analysis to show it was a later forgery; the episode is a classic example of how historical criticism dismantled a foundation of papal power that had been taken for granted for centuries.
As temporal princes, the popes became entangled in the wars, alliances and dynastic intrigues of Italy and Europe. Some were skilful rulers, others splendid patrons and others figures questioned for their worldly lives. That dual role (shepherds of souls and heads of state) would be the root of almost every conflict in the Vatican's history up to the 20th century, and of the long tension between the Church and the civil powers that claimed sovereignty over the territory for themselves.
Between the late 15th and the 16th century, the papacy became the greatest driving force of art in Europe. Popes such as Sixtus IV, Julius II and Leo X understood that artistic splendour was also a form of power and propaganda, and they summoned the finest artists of the age to Rome. The result is a concentration of masterpieces unmatched anywhere in the world, which made the Vatican hill the stage of the High Renaissance.
Between 1473 and 1481, Sixtus IV had the chapel that bears his name built, the Sistine, intended for great papal ceremonies and for conclaves. His nephew Julius II, a warlike and ambitious pope, made two decisions that would define the face of the Vatican: in 1506 he laid the first stone of the new St. Peter's Basilica, to a design by Donato Bramante, and he commissioned the artists working in Rome to produce the works that are now symbols of Western art. Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling between 1508 and 1512, including the famous 'Creation of Adam'; at the same time, Raphael decorated the papal rooms with frescoes such as 'The School of Athens'.
The undertaking was colossal and hugely expensive. To pay for the new St. Peter's, the Church stepped up the sale of indulgences, a practice that in 1517 sparked Martin Luther's protest and set off the Protestant Reformation. It is one of the great ironies of Vatican history: the very project that produced Christianity's most famous basilica helped split Western Christendom in two.
In the midst of all that splendour came one of the most brutal catastrophes in the city's history. On 6 May 1527, during the wars between Emperor Charles V and the League of Cognac (which Pope Clement VII, of the Medici family, had joined), an imperial army, mostly unpaid and mutinous and made up of German soldiers (many of them Lutherans), Spaniards and Italians, stormed Rome unchecked.
The defence collapsed almost at once. The Swiss Guard, the corps that protected the pope, held out on the steps of St. Peter's to cover Clement VII's escape: the vast majority of its men died in the fighting, and that sacrifice became etched in the corps' memory. To this day new guards swear loyalty to the pope on 6 May in remembrance of that day. The pontiff managed to take refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo, connected to the Vatican by a passageway, and remained there under siege for months until he paid a huge ransom.
What followed was a long and savage sack: churches desecrated, palaces wrecked, massacres, and an epidemic on top of the famine. Between deaths and flight, Rome's population is estimated to have plunged from about 55,000 people to around 10,000. The 1527 sack is often seen as the symbolic end of the Roman Renaissance and as a blow from which the papacy's prestige was slow to recover. It also reinforced an idea that would come back again and again: without a power to guarantee his independence, the pope was at the mercy of whichever army came along.
After the trauma of the sack and the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the Church responded with the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and a cultural offensive: the Counter-Reformation. Art became a tool to move, persuade and reaffirm the Catholic faith, and Rome became the great showcase for that strategy. The Baroque style, theatrical and emotional, found its most ambitious expression in the Vatican.
The new St. Peter's Basilica was completed over more than a century with the contributions of one genius after another. Michelangelo, appointed chief architect in 1546, designed the great dome, which was finished by Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana around 1590. But the man who gave the whole complex its definitive face was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the great master of the Baroque. Between 1623 and 1634 he raised the colossal bronze baldachin over the high altar and Peter's tomb; and between 1656 and 1667, commissioned by Pope Alexander VII, he designed St. Peter's Square with its double elliptical colonnade of 284 columns, conceived as two arms embracing the faithful.
The current basilica was finally consecrated in 1626 by Pope Urban VIII, thirteen hundred years after Constantine's old church. The result of all that effort is the Vatican the world recognises: a monumental stage set designed to impress and to proclaim, in stone and bronze, the continuity of the Roman Church in the face of those who had challenged it.
The 19th century brought nationalism and the project to unify Italy, the Risorgimento, which collided head-on with the existence of the Papal States in the centre of the peninsula. Rome, ruled by the pope and protected for years by a French garrison, was the last missing piece of Italian unity. When the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 forced France to withdraw its troops, the Kingdom of Italy made its move.
On 20 September 1870, the Italian army breached the walls of Rome next to Porta Pia and entered the city after a brief fight that left a few dozen dead. Pope Pius IX had ordered only a token resistance, to put on record that he was yielding to force. The capture of Rome brought an end to the Papal States, which had existed since the 8th century, and with them the temporal power of the papacy. A plebiscite ratified the annexation, and in 1871 Rome became the capital of Italy.
The pope rejected the situation and the compensation the new state offered him under the Law of Guarantees. Pius IX and his successors considered themselves 'prisoners in the Vatican' and shut themselves away in the palace, never again setting foot on Italian soil or recognising the kingdom. This opened the so-called 'Roman Question': for almost sixty years, the papacy and the Italian state had no relations, and the pontiff's legal status was left in limbo. The independence lost in 1527, and confirmed as a problem in 1870, would only be resolved in the 20th century.
The Roman Question was closed on 11 February 1929 with the signing of the Lateran Pacts between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. They were signed on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III by the head of government, Benito Mussolini, and on behalf of Pope Pius XI by the cardinal secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri. The agreement had three parts: a treaty recognising the pope's sovereignty over a territory of his own, a financial convention compensating the Church for the Papal States lost in 1870, and a concordat regulating the position of the Catholic Church in Italy.
That treaty created the State of Vatican City on the 44 hectares around the basilica and the palaces: the smallest independent country in the world, with the pope as head of state. A new entity was born, distinct from the Holy See: a sovereign territory that at last guaranteed the pontiff's material independence from any power.
The fact that the agreement was signed with the Fascist regime has been the subject of analysis and debate. For Mussolini, the pacts brought legitimacy and the Church's backing; for Pius XI, they solved a problem no previous government had been willing to settle and secured the freedom of the Holy See. Relations between the Vatican and Fascism were far from idyllic: in 1931, the encyclical 'Non abbiamo bisogno' condemned the regime's attempt to monopolise the education of young people, and the friction continued. Historians still argue about the scope of that understanding; what nobody disputes is that it gave rise to the state that exists today.
With the Second World War, the new state found itself a neutral enclave surrounded by an Italy that was first Fascist and allied with Germany, and then, from 1943, occupied by German troops. Pope Pius XI had died in 1939, shortly before war broke out; he was succeeded by Pius XII, whose pontificate was defined by the war and remains one of the most debated in modern history.
The Vatican formally kept its neutrality and carried out intense humanitarian and diplomatic work. During the German occupation, convents, churches and Holy See buildings in Rome sheltered many persecuted people, including Jews. At the same time, Pius XII's public conduct in the face of the Holocaust has generated a far-reaching historiographical controversy: his defenders argue that his caution and discreet action saved lives and prevented worse reprisals, while his critics fault him for not explicitly and publicly denouncing the extermination of the Jews.
In recent decades that debate has been fed by the gradual opening of the Vatican archives for the period, a step taken to allow a better-documented assessment. This is a case where precision matters: there are established facts (the neutrality, the help given to refugees, the deportation of Rome's Jews in October 1943 almost under the pope's windows) and there is a still-open interpretation of the Holy See's silences and the limits of its action. The discussion is still very much alive among specialists.
The most important religious event at the Vatican in the 20th century took place in St. Peter's Basilica itself, turned into a council hall. Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, which sat from 11 October 1962 to 8 December 1965 and brought together more than two thousand bishops from around the world. It was the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church and the most ambitious attempt to bring the institution 'up to date' with the modern world, in the word that summed up its spirit: aggiornamento.
John XXIII died in 1963, when the council had barely begun, and it was his successor, Paul VI, who carried it on and brought it to a close. Over four sessions, the assembly approved sixteen documents (constitutions, decrees and declarations) that transformed central aspects of Catholic life: Mass was no longer required to be celebrated in Latin and moved into each country's own language, with the priest facing the congregation; the relationship with other Christian denominations and other religions was rethought; and the role of lay people was broadened.
Vatican II opened a period of renewal, but also of internal tensions that continue to this day. Traditionalist groups rejected several of its reforms, especially the liturgical ones, and the debate over how to interpret the council (as a break with tradition or as continuity with it) still runs through the Church. Rarely has a handful of documents drafted in Rome had such a visible, everyday effect on the lives of so many millions of people.
The second half of the 20th century and the start of the 21st gave the Vatican an unprecedented global reach. The pontificate of John Paul II (1978-2005), the first non-Italian pope in centuries, turned the bishop of Rome into a media figure and a traveller, with an acknowledged role in wearing down the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. His successor, Benedict XVI, made an exceptional gesture in February 2013: he resigned the papacy, the first voluntary papal resignation since that of Gregory XII in 1415.
That conclave produced Francis, the Argentine cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit to hold the office, who brought a more austere tone and a strong focus on the poor, migrants and the environment. Francis died on 21 April 2025. On 8 May 2025, the conclave gathered in the Sistine Chapel elected the American cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who took the name Leo XIV and became the first pope born in the United States.
Today's Vatican also carries difficult, unresolved issues. The crisis over sexual abuse committed by members of the clergy, and its cover-up, hit the Church worldwide and forced recent popes to take measures and ask for forgiveness. The Vatican's finances, managed in part by the so-called 'Vatican bank' (the IOR), have been the subject of scandals and successive reforms aimed at transparency. And so the smallest state on the planet remains, because of its symbolic weight, one of the most closely watched players in the world: a country of fewer than a thousand inhabitants whose voice reaches more than a billion faithful.
The 2 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
The St. Peter's Basilica you visit today is actually the second one built on this site. The first, the Constantinian basilica, was commissioned by Emperor Constantine around 320 over the apostle's venerated tomb, and for more than a thousand years it was one of the great pilgrimage destinations of Christendom. Beneath its five-aisled nave, emperors were crowned and popes were buried.
By around 1500, that thousand-year-old building was in poor shape: the walls were giving way and the structures were close to collapse. Pope Julius II then made a decision as ambitious as it was controversial in its day: rather than repair the old basilica, he would have it demolished to build an entirely new one, worthy of the prestige of the Renaissance papacy. The first stone of the new St. Peter's was laid on 18 April 1506. Demolition of the old one dragged on for decades, and its last remains disappeared around 1605.
Building the new basilica took more than a hundred years and passed through the hands of the greatest architects of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The first design was by Donato Bramante, who planned a Greek-cross layout crowned by a great dome inspired by the Pantheon. After his death, the project passed to Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and other masters, each with his own idea of the building.
In 1546, at 71, Michelangelo took over as chief architect. He simplified the plans, strengthened the piers and designed the dome that would define Rome's skyline. Later, the architect Carlo Maderno lengthened the layout into a Latin cross and built the great façade, finished in 1614. The basilica was finally consecrated in 1626 by Pope Urban VIII. The result is the largest church in Catholicism: the combined effort of generations that, despite changes of hands and of vision, achieved an astonishing monumental unity.
The interior of St. Peter's is a catalogue of masterpieces. Just inside, on the right, is Michelangelo's 'Pietà', carved between 1498 and 1499, when the artist was barely in his twenties: a young Virgin holding the body of the dead Christ, with a serenity and technique that amazed his contemporaries. It is the only work Michelangelo ever signed, and since an attack in 1972 it has been displayed behind glass.
At the centre of the basilica, above the high altar —beneath which tradition places Peter's tomb—, rises Gian Lorenzo Bernini's bronze baldachin, built between 1623 and 1634 on the orders of Pope Urban VIII. Almost thirty metres high, with twisted Solomonic columns, it marks in theatrical fashion the exact spot that gives meaning to the whole building. At the far end, the 'Chair of Saint Peter', also by Bernini, wraps an ancient chair venerated as the apostle's throne in an explosion of bronze and golden light. The entire interior is designed to draw the eye and the emotions towards that axis: the tomb over which the basilica was built.
The dome of St. Peter's is one of the great feats of Renaissance engineering and the feature that dominates Rome's entire skyline. It was designed by Michelangelo, who took up Bramante's idea of a great vault inspired by the Pantheon and raised it on a drum ringed with columns. He conceived a double-shell dome, with an inner and an outer layer, to achieve height and stability at the same time.
Michelangelo died in 1564, before seeing it finished. The work was completed by Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana around 1590, under Pope Sixtus V; they kept the essentials of the original design but gave the dome a slightly more pointed profile. At about 133 metres to the tip of the lantern, it is still one of the tallest domes in the world. Today you can climb it: a lift and then a narrow staircase, squeezed between the two shells, lead up to the lantern, which offers one of the most famous views of the city, with Bernini's square at your feet.
The space leading to the basilica is a masterpiece in its own right. St. Peter's Square was designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini between 1656 and 1667, commissioned by Pope Alexander VII, with an explicit idea: the colonnade should be like two arms embracing the faithful and the pilgrims arriving in Rome. The square is elliptical and is surrounded by a double colonnade of 284 columns arranged in four rows, topped by 140 statues of saints.
In the centre stands an Egyptian obelisk that the Romans brought over in imperial times and that once stood in the circus where, according to tradition, Peter died; it was moved to its current spot in 1586, in an engineering operation famous for its difficulty. The square was conceived as the stage for the great papal ceremonies: it is where crowds gather for the 'Urbi et Orbi' blessing and where, after a conclave, the name of the new pope is announced to the world. Few squares sum up an intention so well: turning architecture into a gesture of welcome and an instrument of faith.
The Vatican Museums, today one of the largest art collections in the world, were born almost by chance from a discovery. In January 1506 the 'Laocoön' was unearthed in a Roman vineyard: a Hellenistic sculptural group showing the Trojan priest and his sons trapped by serpents. Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo, who were working at the Vatican, to examine it, and on their advice he bought it at once and displayed it in the Belvedere courtyard.
That collection of ancient sculptures gathered by Julius II is the seed of today's museums. Over the centuries, successive popes expanded it: in the 18th century the Pio-Clementine Museum was organised, with the great classical statues; in the 19th, Gregory XVI opened the Egyptian and Etruscan sections. Today the Vatican Museums stretch over kilometres of galleries —from Bramante's helical staircase, with its spiral ramp, to halls of maps, tapestries and modern art— that lead, as the finale of the route, to the Sistine Chapel.
Before reaching the Sistine, the route passes through the Raphael Rooms, four halls that were the private apartments of Pope Julius II, who commissioned the young Raphael Sanzio to decorate them from 1508 onwards, at the same time as Michelangelo was painting the Sistine ceiling just a few metres away. The two giants working side by side, sizing each other up and competing, is one of the great moments of the High Renaissance.
The most famous work in these rooms is 'The School of Athens', in the Room of the Segnatura: a monumental composition that brings together the great philosophers of Antiquity —with Plato and Aristotle at the centre— beneath grandiose architecture. In it, Raphael gave several artists of his own day the features of the ancient sages, in a tribute to classical thought that sums up the humanist ideal of the Renaissance. The rooms show how art, in the service of the papacy, sought to reconcile Greco-Roman pagan culture with the Christian faith.
The Sistine Chapel owes its name to Pope Sixtus IV, who had it built between 1473 and 1481 as the great chapel of the papal palace. Its dimensions are no accident: according to one tradition, they reproduce the measurements of Solomon's Temple as described in the Bible. Before Michelangelo arrived, the walls had already been decorated by some of the finest painters of the day —Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio and others— with scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ.
Beyond its artistic value, the Sistine plays a political and religious role of the first order: for centuries it has been where the conclave of cardinals meets to elect a new pope. The most recent pontificates were decided beneath these frescoes, including the May 2025 conclave that elected Leo XIV. It is at once one of the most admired artistic spaces on the planet and a room for decisions that is still very much in use.
The Sistine ceiling is probably the most famous fresco in the history of art. Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the vault, and the artist —who saw himself above all as a sculptor and accepted the commission reluctantly— worked on it between 1508 and 1512, much of the time lying on his back on high scaffolding, in exhausting conditions.
The result is a monumental programme of more than three hundred figures telling episodes from Genesis, from the creation of the world to the flood. At the centre is the most reproduced scene of all: the 'Creation of Adam', in which the hands of God and the first man almost touch, separated by a tiny gap charged with tension. All around, prophets, sibyls and biblical scenes display a powerful anatomy and a dramatic force that changed Western painting forever. The Sistine ceiling turned Michelangelo, already famous as a sculptor, into the most influential painter of his time.
Almost thirty years after finishing the ceiling, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine to paint the altar wall. Between 1536 and 1541, by then an old man, he created 'The Last Judgment', a huge composition depicting the end of time, with Christ the judge at the centre surrounded by a multitude of souls rising to heaven or plunging into hell. It is a darker, more tormented work than the ceiling, shaped by the climate of crisis left by the Reformation and the sack of Rome in 1527.
The abundance of nude figures caused a scandal in some circles of the Counter-Reformation Church. After Michelangelo's death, the painter Daniele da Volterra was commissioned to cover several of the nudes with drapes and veils, which earned him the mocking nickname 'il Braghettone', the breeches-maker. The 20th-century restorations recovered much of the original colour of the whole work. Above the altar where the conclave is held, the 'Last Judgment' closes the great painted story of the Sistine: from the creation of the world on the ceiling to the judgment of humanity on the wall.
Beneath the floor of the basilica, several metres down, lies the oldest and most surprising level of the whole Vatican: a Roman necropolis with streets of mausoleums dating from the 1st to the 4th centuries. It was buried when Constantine levelled the hill to build his basilica, and so, unintentionally, he preserved it for sixteen hundred years. Today it can be visited with advance booking, on the tour known as the 'scavi' (excavations), in small groups.
The excavations that brought it to light took place between 1940 and 1949, on the orders of Pope Pius XII, with the explicit aim of finding the tomb of the apostle Peter directly beneath the high altar. Archaeologists found a humble burial next to a red wall, over which a small monument had been built in the 2nd century, exactly on the axis of the basilica. In 1968, Paul VI announced that bone remains found at the site had been identified as Peter's, although some specialists still have reservations about that attribution.
Beyond archaeological certainty, which can never be fully settled, the necropolis offers something exceptional: walking beneath the largest basilica in Christendom and seeing, with your own eyes, the reason everything above it was built. Here, in a poor burial from imperial Rome, began the two-thousand-year story that turned a hill on the banks of the Tiber into the smallest and most singular country in the world.
Hardly anything that happened to Vatican City happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
