Visiting the Vatican Necropolis, the 'Scavi', is one of the most exclusive, moving and hard-to-get experiences in the whole Vatican. Several metres below the gleaming floor of St Peter's Basilica lies another world: an ancient burial street from imperial Rome, with decorated mausoleums, inscriptions, mosaics and sarcophagi, which lay buried and forgotten for fifteen hundred years. Going down there is like travelling back to the 1st century, when this hill was a cemetery on the outskirts of Rome.
But what makes this necropolis unique is what lies at its centre: what Christian tradition, backed by 20th-century excavations, identifies as the tomb of the apostle Peter. All of St Peter's Basilica —the largest church in Christendom, with its dome, its baldachin and its centuries of history— was built exactly over this spot, a remarkable continuity you can see with your own eyes when you realise the papal altar sits directly above the tomb.
This practical guide explains the essentials of such a special visit: how to book (you must apply in advance to the Fabbrica di San Pietro, and places are very limited), how much it costs, the restrictions (minimum age, no photos, not for the claustrophobic) and what you'll see on this one-hour guided tour that very few visitors to Rome ever get to do. It's a visit for anyone who wants to touch, almost literally, the foundations of Christianity.
The necropolis began as a pagan cemetery on the outskirts of 1st-century Rome, on the slope of the Vatican hill, next to the circus of Caligula and Nero where tradition places the martyrdom of St Peter around the year 64-67. The apostle is said to have been buried there, in a modest tomb that soon became a place of veneration; around the year 160 a small monument was built over it. When Emperor Constantine built the first basilica in the 4th century, he had much of the necropolis buried to level the ground, always preserving the spot of the tomb. So it stayed buried and forgotten until, between 1939 and 1950, excavations ordered by Pope Pius XII brought it to light; in 1968, Paul VI announced that some remains had been identified as those of the apostle. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The other Vatican: the Vatican Museums and the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgment, and the underground necropolis with the presumed tomb of Saint Peter.
Read the history of The Museums →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 50 activities in Roma. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In the 1st century, the Vatican Hill was not the heart of Catholicism but a corner on the outskirts of Rome, on the right bank of the Tiber, outside the city's sacred boundary. Roman law prohibited burying the dead within the city limits, so cemeteries lined the roads leading out of Rome. On the Vatican slope, next to the circus that Caligula and Nero had built for chariot races, a necropolis took shape: a 'city of the dead' with streets of family mausoleums that kept growing between the 1st and 4th centuries.
These mausoleums were small brick buildings, like houses, where families placed the urns holding the ashes of their dead and, later, once burial replaced cremation, the sarcophagi. They were decorated with stucco, paintings, mosaics and inscriptions bearing the owners' names. Most belonged to pagan families and carried the imagery of Roman religion, but over time Christian burials began to appear as well, evidence of the slow spread of the new faith.
In this same setting, according to Christian tradition, an event took place that would change the hill's destiny: around the year 64-67, during Nero's persecutions following the great fire of Rome, the apostle Peter is said to have been martyred — crucified upside down, according to the account — in the neighbouring circus, and buried in a humble grave in this necropolis. Centuries later, that modest grave would become the centre of the largest church in the world.
The tomb of the apostle Peter did not go unnoticed by Rome's early Christians. Although veneration had to be discreet in times of persecution, the memory of the exact spot was carefully passed down from generation to generation. Around the year 160, a small commemorative monument was built over the grave: a kind of aedicule with columns set against a wall (the so-called 'Red Wall'). This monument is known as the 'Trophy of Gaius', because a Christian writer named Gaius, around the year 200, mentioned it as the visible marker showing where Peter was buried, on the Vatican.
This detail is crucial: it means that by the end of the 2nd century there was already a specific, recognisable place that Rome's Christian community identified as the apostle's tomb, and that this place is the very one on which everything else would be built. Around the monument, a nearby wall — the 'Graffiti Wall' — gradually filled with inscriptions left by pilgrims, a moving testimony of popular devotion to Saint Peter centuries before any great basilica existed.
The continuity of veneration at that exact spot explains one of the most astonishing decisions in the history of architecture: when the time came to build a great church, this awkward site was chosen on purpose, on the slope of a hill that had to be cut down and levelled, just so the altar would stand directly over the apostle's tomb. No architect would have chosen that ground for convenience; it was chosen for faith.
The decisive turn came with Constantine, the first emperor to protect Christianity. Around the year 319-333, Constantine decided to build a great basilica over Peter's tomb, the first St. Peter's. To raise a building of that size on the hillside, his engineers had to undertake a colossal levelling project: they sliced away part of the hill on one side and, on the other, filled in and buried much of the necropolis, covering the streets of mausoleums with earth and rubble to create a flat platform.
In that operation, the builders took extraordinary care over one point: they respected and preserved the monument over Peter's tomb, leaving it right beneath the altar of the new basilica. In other words, they sacrificed and buried the entire surrounding cemetery, but protected its heart: the apostle's tomb. Beyond its symbolic value, this choice had a fortunate consequence for history: once buried, the mausoleums of the necropolis were remarkably well preserved, safe from the passage of time, looting and alterations, like a time capsule beneath the basilica.
Over the following centuries, the necropolis lay forgotten beneath the floor of Constantine's basilica and, later, beneath the new Renaissance and Baroque basilica that replaced it from the 16th century onwards. No one walked those streets of tombs any more; all that was known, through tradition, was that somewhere in the depths lay the apostle's grave. It would take until the 20th century for the necropolis to see the light again.
The rediscovery of the necropolis began almost by chance. In 1939, when Pope Pius XI died, it was decided to bury him in the Vatican Grottoes, and during the work to prepare his tomb beneath the basilica floor, the workers came across ancient Roman structures. The new pope, Pius XII, then authorised a systematic archaeological excavation beneath the basilica, an extremely delicate job carried out in secret, with enormous precautions so as not to damage the church's foundations, between 1940 and 1949.
The excavations brought to light the street of mausoleums of the Roman necropolis, extraordinarily well preserved, and made it possible to reach the area of Peter's tomb, with the 'Trophy of Gaius', the Red Wall and the Graffiti Wall. In 1950, in the middle of the Holy Year, Pius XII announced that the apostle's tomb had been found, while remaining cautious about identifying the remains. Research continued over the following decades, notably by the archaeologist and epigraphist Margherita Guarducci, who studied the graffiti on the wall and read in one of them the Greek inscription 'Peter is here'.
Guarducci also linked to the tomb some bone remains — of an elderly man of sturdy build, wrapped in a cloth of purple and gold — found in a cavity in the Graffiti Wall. On that basis, Pope Paul VI announced in 1968 that the remains of Saint Peter had been identified with reasonable probability. The Church holds this identification to be very likely, while archaeological research, as is natural for a matter twenty centuries old, keeps a margin of caution.
Since its rediscovery, the Vatican Necropolis has been open to a very small number of visitors, on guided tours run by the Fabbrica di San Pietro through the Ufficio Scavi. The reason for such a tight limit — around 250 visitors a day, in small groups — is conservation: this is a fragile, damp and delicate site, beneath the weight of the largest church in the world, where too many people, the heat and the moisture of human breath would endanger frescoes, stucco and inscriptions nearly two thousand years old.
Walking through the Scavi is an experience unlike any other in the Vatican. While upstairs, in the basilica, crowds gather beneath Michelangelo's dome and Bernini's baldachin, down below, in half-light and silence, you walk along a street of Roman tombs that lay buried for fifteen centuries, until you reach the spot that tradition identifies as Peter's grave. Seeing how the papal altar, tens of metres above, stands exactly over that tomb makes the whole logic of the Vatican click at once: a colossal basilica built, layer upon layer, over the grave of a fisherman from Galilee.
In an hour-long visit, the Necropolis thus condenses twenty centuries of history: from the pagan cemetery of imperial Rome to Peter's martyrdom, from Constantine's basilica to the 20th-century excavation, and from archaeology to the faith of millions of pilgrims. It is one of the hardest visits to get in Rome and, for many, one of the most profound: the chance to touch, almost literally, the foundations on which Christianity was built.
