Archbasilica of St John Lateran

Ask which church is Rome's cathedral and almost everyone says St Peter's. They are wrong, and not on a technicality: St Peter's is not a cathedral at all. The Pope's seat as Bishop of Rome is a chair in the apse of this building, which is older than St Peter's, ranks above it, and receives a fraction of its visitors. It also contains the doors of the Roman Senate, an Egyptian obelisk older than Moses, a Gothic canopy said to hold the heads of Peter and Paul, and a staircase people still climb on their knees. This guide walks all of it.

A thousand years as the centre of the Church

Constantine's gift

The Lateran is where Christianity stopped hiding. After the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine handed the Lateran estate — family property, and until then the barracks of a cavalry regiment that had backed his rival — to Pope Sylvester I, and work on a basilica began around 324. The traditional consecration date is 9 November, and the anniversary is still kept by the whole Church rather than just by this parish, which tells you something about the building's standing. Its 1,700th anniversary fell in 2024.

What went up was the first great public church in the Western world, a decade or so before St Peter's, three centuries before the Pantheon became a church. And for the next thousand years the popes lived here. The palace next door, not the Vatican, was the seat of the medieval papacy: five ecumenical councils met on this site — 1123, 1139, 1179, the enormous Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and the Fifth, which wound up in 1517, weeks before Luther posted his theses.

Fire, earthquake, exile, bomb

Very little of Constantine's building can be seen, because the Lateran has had the worst luck of any major church in Rome. An earthquake brought much of it down in 896. Fire gutted it in 1308 and again in 1361, during the Avignon exile, when there was no pope in Rome to pay for repairs. By the time the papacy came back, the palace was uninhabitable and the popes moved across the river to the Vatican, which is how St Peter's became the church everybody photographs.

What followed was four centuries of rebuilding: the ceiling in the 1560s, the transept for the Jubilee of 1600, Borromini's nave for 1650, Galilei's facade in 1735, and a wholesale rebuilding of the apse in the 1880s. Then, at about four minutes past midnight on 28 July 1993, a Mafia car bomb went off against the north side — one of two in Rome that night, retaliation for John Paul II's denunciation of Cosa Nostra — blowing a five-metre crater, wrecking the portico frescoes and the newly restored organ, and gutting the Vicariate offices in the palace. Nobody died. It was all repaired in the 1990s and there is nothing left for a visitor to see, which is itself worth knowing: this building's turbulent history is not confined to the Middle Ages.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Lateran is really four buildings — basilica, cloister, baptistery and the Scala Santa across the road — and most visitors do the first and leave. Doing all four takes about two hours and is one of the best-value mornings in Rome.

The obelisk in the piazza

Start with the thing in the square, because it is the oldest object you will see in the city and hardly anyone looks at it. The Lateran obelisk was cut for Thutmose III and raised by his grandson at Karnak around 1400 BC. Constantius II had it shipped to Rome in 357 and set up in the Circus Maximus; it fell, was found broken in three pieces in 1587, and was re-erected here by Domenico Fontana for Sixtus V in August 1588, about four metres shorter than it began.

Even shortened it is the tallest standing ancient Egyptian obelisk in the world — the shaft alone is around 32 metres, and with its base the whole thing runs to about 45. Figures vary depending on what is being measured, and you will see 28, 32 and 45.7 all quoted with confidence. It was already more than a thousand years old when Constantine gave away the land it now stands on.

The facade, and who is actually on it

Alessandro Galilei won the competition for the front in 1732, beating more than twenty architects including Vanvitelli and the man who built the Trevi Fountain, and it was blessed on 8 December 1735. It is a cliff of travertine with a benediction loggia across the upper storey — the balcony popes bless from, moved here from the medieval loggia round the side so that it faced the big piazza.

Fifteen statues stand on the balustrade, each about seven metres tall. Every guidebook will tell you they are Christ and the twelve apostles. They are not. They are Christ the Saviour in the centre, the two Johns either side of him, and then twelve Doctors of the Church, Latin and Greek. The apostles are inside, in the nave. It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing this site exists to get right.

The Holy Door

The rightmost of the five doors is a Holy Door, one of only four in Rome — the others are at St Peter's, St Mary Major and St Paul Outside the Walls. It is bricked shut except in a Jubilee year. The present bronze door is by Floriano Bodini, made for the Jubilee of 2000; look at the crucifixion on it and you will see the nails through Christ's wrists rather than his palms, a deliberate anatomical correction that almost no other crucifix in Rome makes.

It was last opened on 29 December 2024 for the Jubilee of 2025 and closed again on 27 December 2025. Barring an extraordinary jubilee, the next opening is 2050.

The doors of the Roman Senate

Walk in through the central doorway and touch the bronze, because these are the doors of the Curia Julia, the Senate House in the Forum. They were cast under Domitian in the late first century, restored under Diocletian, and moved here by Alexander VII in 1660. They were too short for Galilei's opening, so a bronze upper section was added — look for the eight-pointed stars and the little mountains, which are the Chigi arms of the pope who moved them.

The doors now hanging in the Curia in the Forum are modern copies. The originals are these, and they are opened and shut every day by a man with a key. Senators of the Roman Republic's successor state walked between these leaves. There is nothing else quite like it in Rome, and the average visitor walks through without a glance.

Borromini's nave, and what is inside the piers

Innocent X gave Borromini the interior for the Holy Year of 1650, and the job was a rescue: the medieval nave was leaning and unsafe. Rather than demolish, Borromini encased the old colonnade in five colossal piers a side, each with a niche framed by columns of green antique marble, and threw a white Baroque skin over the whole thing.

The standard account — repeated by every guide — is that the thirty granite columns of Constantine's basilica are still standing inside those piers, entombed. The scholarship is more careful: some may have been removed. It is a lovely idea either way, and worth knowing that it is probably, rather than certainly, true.

What Borromini wanted was to vault the nave in masonry. He was refused, because the sixteenth-century wooden ceiling was to be kept. So the building has a Baroque body under a Renaissance lid, and the join is visible if you look for it.

The twelve apostles

The niches stood empty for fifty years. Clement XI filled them between 1703 and 1718 with twelve colossal apostles, to a scheme overseen by the painter Carlo Maratti and carved by the best sculptors in Rome: Camillo Rusconi, Pierre Le Gros, Pierre-Étienne Monnot, Giuseppe Mazzuoli and others. St Paul stands in for St Matthias, which is a choice with a history behind it.

They are wildly uneven, and that is the fun of them. Rusconi's four are the best — his St Matthew in particular, a Michelangelesque figure whose restraint points forward to neoclassicism a generation early. Le Gros's St Bartholomew carries his own flayed skin, as at the Sistine Chapel. Monnot's St Paul is the other one worth crossing the nave for. Several of the rest are Baroque drapery with a man somewhere inside it.

The ceiling

Gilded, coffered, and enormous, put up between 1562 and 1567 under Pius IV and finished under Pius V, whose arms are on it. The design is traditionally given to Pirro Ligorio and the carving associated with Daniele da Volterra — the same man who painted the loincloths onto the Last Judgment. Both attributions are traditional rather than documented. It is the thing Borromini was not allowed to remove, and the reason the nave still has a flat top.

The floor

Look down. The Cosmatesque pavement was begun around 1300 under Boniface VIII and laid in the form you see around 1425, paid for by the Colonna family of Pope Martin V — their column badge is worked into the paving. Much of the material is genuinely medieval, but the surface has been relaid repeatedly: Borromini added rectangular framing panels in 1650, and the rebuilding of the sanctuary in the 1880s disturbed more of it. The colours are noticeably duller than at other Cosmati floors in Rome, because by the fifteenth century the supply of recycled ancient coloured marble was running out.

Giotto, on the first pier

On the first pier of the right-hand aisle, in a frame Borromini made for it, is a fragment of fresco showing Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming the first Jubilee from a balcony in 1300, flanked by two attendants. It came off the medieval benediction loggia when that was demolished. It is traditionally Giotto's, and is very widely published as his; it is not documented, and some scholars give it to a Roman follower. Either way it is the earliest surviving image of the event that invented the holy year, and it is the size of a poster in a building the size of a railway station.

The papal altar and its Gothic canopy

At the crossing, a spindly Gothic canopy sits in the middle of all that Baroque like a piece of another building, which is exactly what it is. Urban V commissioned it in 1367; Giovanni di Stefano built it, and it was consecrated with the altar in 1370. Up in the tabernacle at the top are the reliquaries said to contain the heads of St Peter and St Paul.

The original silver-gilt busts are gone. They were seized and melted down in 1799 during the French occupation, to help pay the indemnity Napoleon had imposed at Tolentino; the ones up there now were made in 1804 and are associated with Valadier. Under the altar table itself is a wooden slab which tradition holds is the table St Peter and the earliest popes said Mass on. Only the Pope may celebrate at this altar, though in practice he delegates it constantly.

The confessio and Martin V

Steps go down in front of the altar to the confessio, built for Pius IX in 1851. At the bottom, set in the floor, is a bronze effigy of Pope Martin V — Oddone Colonna, the man elected at Constance in 1417 to end the Great Schism, and the pope who brought the papacy back to a ruined Rome and started rebuilding it.

The slab is by Simone Ghini, a pupil of Donatello, and older books give it to Donatello himself; the attribution has been argued over for a century. Visitors throw coins onto the effigy, which are collected for charity. It is the most-touched object in the basilica and one of the least-explained.

The apse mosaic, and how much of it is real

The apse blazes with gold: a jewelled cross on a hill with the four rivers of paradise running from it, a bust of the Saviour above, saints in a row, and two tiny kneeling figures who are the artists. The design is Jacopo Torriti's and Jacopo da Camerino's, made around 1291 for Nicholas IV, and the Saviour is said to reproduce the miraculous image that appeared on the wall at the basilica's consecration.

How much of it is theirs is a real dispute, and worth stating plainly. In 1876–86 Leo XIII demolished the medieval apse to lengthen the sanctuary. The basilica's own account says the mosaic was detached and reset with its iconography intact but its artistry irreparably damaged. Most art historians say it was destroyed and copied. The honest position for a visitor: the composition is medieval, the surface is largely nineteenth-century, and contemporaries thought it a scandal.

The cathedra

At the centre of the apse, up a flight of steps behind the altar, is a marble chair with spiral inlaid columns and a shell canopy. This is the cathedra of the Bishop of Rome. It is the reason the word cathedral applies to this building and not to St Peter's, and a new pope formally takes possession of it after his election. It is roped off, unlabelled, and most people photograph the mosaic above it without registering what is underneath.

The transept

The transept was remodelled for the Jubilee of 1600 under Clement VIII, and it is the loudest part of the church: frescoes of the life of Constantine from floor to ceiling, and at the north end the Altar of the Blessed Sacrament, carried on four fluted bronze columns which tradition says were cast from the bronze rams of ships captured at Actium. Above it is a panel said to be part of the table of the Last Supper. The organ is here too — the one wrecked by the 1993 bomb and since rebuilt.

The Corsini Chapel

First chapel on the left, and easily the finest eighteenth-century room in the building. Galilei built it in 1732–36 for Clement XII, a Corsini, at the same time as he was building the facade: a Greek cross under a dome, lined in coloured marble, with the pope's monument by Giovanni Battista Maini on one side and his uncle Cardinal Neri Corsini opposite.

The pope himself lies in a vast porphyry basin that was not made for him or for anyone Christian. It was found near the Pantheon and is generally said to come from the Baths of Agrippa; the more romantic version, repeated for centuries, is that it stood in the Pantheon's portico and held Agrippa's own ashes. Either way an eighteenth-century pope is buried in a first-century Roman bath.

The cloister

Through a door in the left transept, and worth every cent of the four euros. The cloister was built in the 1220s by the Vassalletto family of Roman marble workers — an inscription names Pietro Vassalletto and his father — and it is a square of about thirty-six metres with double colonnettes, some straight, some twisted like barley sugar, inlaid with gold and coloured mosaic. It survived every fire, and it is the one place in the complex where you can see what the medieval Lateran looked like.

Round the walk is the wreckage of the vanished basilica, propped against the walls: ancient altars, tomb slabs, carved fragments, a well-head. Look for the sedia stercoraria, a rough marble seat used in medieval papal enthronements as a symbol of humility; the tomb of Cardinal Annibaldi by Arnolfo di Cambio; the gravestone of the humanist Lorenzo Valla, who proved the Donation of Constantine a forgery and is buried in the church that document was written to benefit; a column said to be from Pilate's palace; and a marble strip displayed as the measure of Christ's height. That last is a medieval pilgrim curiosity and evidence of nothing, which is not a reason to skip it.

The baptistery

Free, separate door, and skipped by nearly everybody. The Lateran Baptistery was founded under Constantine and rebuilt in its present octagonal form by Sixtus III in the 430s, and that octagon is one of the most influential shapes in European architecture: Florence, Pisa, Parma and a hundred lesser baptisteries descend from it. Eight porphyry columns over six metres tall ring the sunken font, carrying an architrave and a second, smaller order above.

The legend that Constantine was baptised here is almost certainly untrue — he was baptised near Nicomedia, on his deathbed, probably by an Arian. What is true is in the side chapels, and they are extraordinary. The chapel of Sts Cyprian and Justina has a fifth-century apse mosaic often called the oldest surviving in Rome. The vestibule of Sts Rufina and Secunda has fifth-century vine scrolls on deep blue. The chapel of St John the Evangelist keeps bronze doors of 1196 that sing on their hinges. And the chapel of St Venantius, added in the 640s to house relics of Dalmatian martyrs, has gold-ground mosaics of Christ between angels that are seventh century and largely intact.

The Scala Santa

Across the road, in a building Sixtus V put up in 1589 when the old papal palace came down, are twenty-eight marble steps that tradition says Christ climbed at his trial before Pilate and Helena brought to Rome. They may be ascended only on the knees, and on any morning you will find people doing it, slowly, in silence, praying at each step. Four ordinary staircases run alongside for everyone else, and there is no charge for either.

The marble has been boxed in walnut since 1724, because pilgrims' knees had worn it hollow. In 2018–19 the casing came off for restoration and the bare stone was exposed for the first time in nearly three centuries; the intended few weeks ran from April into the summer because so many people came. The wood is back now, with small glazed openings so you can see the marble underneath.

At the top is the Sancta Sanctorum, the private chapel of the medieval popes, spared when the palace was demolished. Its inscription reads non est in toto sanctior orbe locus — there is no holier place in all the world. Inside is the Acheiropoieton, an image of Christ enthroned said to have been begun by St Luke and finished by an angel, hence a picture “not made by human hands”; it is fifth- or sixth-century encaustic on walnut and is mostly hidden under later silver. It is ticketed and it keeps its own short hours.

The Triclinium mosaic, on your way out

On the north side of the piazza, opposite the Scala Santa, an apse-shaped structure carries a mosaic showing Christ sending out the apostles, and on the arch, Christ giving the keys to Pope Sylvester and a standard to Constantine on one side, St Peter giving the pallium to Leo III and a standard to Charlemagne on the other. It is a picture with an argument in it about who outranks whom.

It is also not original. The great banqueting hall of Leo III that it came from was demolished in the sixteenth century; Benedict XIV had Ferdinando Fuga build this niche in 1743 and the mosaic was substantially remade. Treat it as an eighteenth-century reconstruction of a ninth-century idea — which is, in a sense, the whole Lateran in one object.

The palace, and a treaty

The Lateran Palace beside the basilica is now open on a paid tour, and it is the least-known good museum in Rome. The piano nobile is a suite of frescoed sixteenth-century rooms, and one of them is the Sala della Conciliazione, where on 11 February 1929 Cardinal Gasparri and Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty that created the Vatican City State and ended sixty years of the popes calling themselves prisoners. The mahogany table, the chairs and the gilt-bronze inkstand they used are still in the room. If you have any interest in how the modern papacy came to exist, this is where it was signed, and it is a ten-minute walk from the Colosseum.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Senate doors Central doorway, first-century bronze from the Curia Julia in the Forum, still opened every morning. The ones in the Forum are copies.
• The cathedra Behind the altar at the top of the apse steps: the actual seat of the Bishop of Rome, and the reason this building outranks St Peter's.
• Rusconi's St Matthew The best of the twelve apostles in the nave, and a piece of neoclassicism thirty years early.
• The Gothic ciborium A canopy of 1370 stranded in a Baroque basilica, holding the reliquary heads of Peter and Paul.
• Martin V in the confessio Down the steps in front of the altar, a bronze effigy by Donatello's pupil, covered in coins.
• The cloister Four euros, twisted mosaic columns, and the salvaged wreckage of the medieval basilica propped round the walls.
• The baptistery Free, next door, ignored — and it holds what may be the oldest apse mosaic in Rome and the octagon every European baptistery copied.
• The obelisk In the square: cut at Karnak around 1400 BC, the tallest ancient Egyptian obelisk standing anywhere.

Insider tips

Do not come on a Sunday if the cloister matters to you: it is closed Sundays and feast days, while the basilica is at its busiest. A weekday at nine gets you the cloister nearly to yourself.

Carry a few euro coins. The cloister and the Sancta Sanctorum are small cash charges and the published prices disagree between the basilica's own site and the ticket agency, which is not the moment to discover the card machine is temperamental.

Cross the road for the Scala Santa even if you have no intention of climbing anything. Watching people go up twenty-eight steps on their knees, in a city that has largely turned its religion into an admission charge, is the single most affecting five minutes in this part of Rome.

Where to stay and eat nearby

San Giovanni is a real neighbourhood rather than a sightseeing district: residential streets, a proper market, and trattorias priced for people who live here. It is a genuinely good place to stay if you would rather come home to a Roman quarter than to the Borgo, and it has a Metro station on the doorstep. Walk five minutes off the piazza in any direction and the prices halve.

More Rome and Vatican churches

• Basilica of San Clemente — a ten-minute walk toward the Colosseum, with three buildings stacked underground.
• Santa Maria Maggiore — another of the four papal basilicas, and another Holy Door, a short ride away.
• St Peter's Basilica — the Vatican basilica most people mistake for Rome's cathedral.

See all the churches in this Rome guide →