St Peter's Basilica

The largest church on Earth, free to walk into, and almost nobody sees more than a tenth of it. This guide goes object by object — what each thing is, where it is, and why it is worth stopping for — plus the practical business of queues, dress code, dome tickets and the crypt.

Building the world's largest church

The basilica that stood here first

The church you walk into is the second on the site. The first was built by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century over what was then a hillside cemetery outside the walls of Rome, and it stood for more than a thousand years — long enough for Charlemagne to be crowned in it on Christmas Day 800. By the fifteenth century it was leaning, patched and far too small for the ambitions of a Renaissance papacy, and the decision was taken to pull down the most venerable building in Western Christendom and start again.

Almost everything from it that could be moved was moved into the new church, which is why so many of the objects below are older than the building around them: the bronze doors, the bronze St Peter, the Navicella mosaic over the entrance, the staircases down to the confessio.

Four architects, and 120 years

Pope Julius II laid the foundation stone on 18 April 1506, to a Greek-cross design by Donato Bramante. Raphael took over, then Antonio da Sangallo, then — in 1546, aged 71 and unpaid by his own insistence — Michelangelo, who threw out most of the accumulated revisions and went back to something close to Bramante's plan. Carlo Maderno lengthened the nave into a Latin cross and built the facade in the early 1600s. Bernini finished the interior and designed the square outside. The basilica was consecrated on 18 November 1626: 120 years to the day, near enough, and not one of the men who began it lived to see it.

That relay is visible if you know where to look. Stand at the crossing and the space is Michelangelo's — centralised, vertical, all four arms equal. Turn and face the door and the nave stretching away is Maderno's addition, which is exactly the thing Michelangelo did not want, because it pushes the dome back from the square and hides it from anyone standing close to the facade.

The dome Michelangelo did not live to see

Michelangelo died in 1564 with the drum built and the dome itself unstarted. Giacomo della Porta completed it in 1590, steepening the profile from the drawings — a change usually read as structural caution, and one that gives the dome the lift it has from a distance.

The numbers are worth carrying in your head, because the building is designed to defeat your sense of scale. The dome stands 136.6 metres from the floor to the top of the cross, still the tallest in the world. Its internal diameter is 41.5 metres — deliberately a little narrower than the Pantheon's, which Michelangelo took as the mark to be measured against. The four piers holding it up are 18 metres across. The church is 220 metres long inside and holds about 60,000 people standing.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see inside, in the order you meet it

What follows is arranged as a walk, from the steps outside to the crypt, rather than by importance. Doing it in this order costs no extra walking; doing it at random costs you the Pietà, because the crowd carries you past it in the first thirty seconds.

The facade, and the two clocks

Maderno's facade is 114.7 metres wide and 45.5 metres high, in travertine, and the thirteen figures along the roofline are Christ, John the Baptist and eleven of the apostles. Peter is not among them — his statue stands at ground level, to the left of the steps, with Paul opposite. The clock faces in the two flanking towers do not agree, and are not meant to: the left one keeps Rome time, the right one keeps mean European time. The central balcony between them is the loggia where a new pope is announced.

The atrium: Filarete's door, and the Door of Death

Five doors lead from the atrium into the church. The central pair is Filarete's, cast in bronze between about 1440 and 1445 for the old basilica and cut about to fit the new one — look for the small scenes along the frames, which include the artist and his assistants dancing. The southernmost is Giacomo Manzù's Door of Death, from 1964, used for funeral processions; among its panels is John XXIII kneeling. High on the wall above the central door, on the atrium side, is the Navicella, a mosaic of Christ walking on the water designed by Giotto around 1310 for the old basilica and so thoroughly restored since that little of Giotto survives in it.

The Holy Door

The door at the far right is bricked up on the inside. It is opened only in a Jubilee year, when the Pope pushes it inward and the wall behind it comes down; it was last opened for the Jubilee of 2025 and will be sealed again at its close. The bronze panels are by Vico Consorti, cast in 1950. Walking through it is the point of a Jubilee pilgrimage, so if your visit falls in a Holy Year, expect a separate and much longer queue for this one doorway.

Michelangelo's Pietà

First chapel on the right, immediately inside. Carved in 1498–99, when Michelangelo was twenty-three or twenty-four, and the only work he ever signed — the band across Mary's chest reads MICHAELA[N]GELVS BONAROTVS FLORENTIN[VS] FACIEBA[T], reportedly added in irritation after he overheard visitors crediting it to a sculptor from Milan. He is said to have regretted the vanity of it and never signed another thing.

Mary is younger than her son and out of scale with him: enlarge her to standing height and she would be enormous. Both are deliberate. It has stood behind bullet-resistant glass since Pentecost 1972, when a man with a geologist's hammer struck it fifteen times, breaking off Mary's arm and part of her face. The restoration is invisible from where you stand; you are looking through glass at about six metres, so this is the one object in the church where a small pair of binoculars genuinely pays.

The nave, and the floor that measures the competition

Now look down. Set into the floor of the nave are brass lines and the names of the world's other great churches — St Paul's in London, Milan Cathedral, Florence Cathedral, Cologne Cathedral — each marking how far along St Peter's that church would reach if you laid it inside. It is a nineteenth-century addition and it is pure swagger, and it is also the fastest way to understand the size of the room you are standing in.

The scale is otherwise almost impossible to read, because everything is enlarged in proportion. The cherubs holding the holy water basins at the first piers look like toddlers; they are two metres tall. The lettering ringing the base of the dome looks like ordinary lettering; it is 1.4 metres high. The 39 statues in the niches along the nave are the founders of religious orders, and the 56 medallions above them are early popes.

The bronze St Peter, and his missing foot

Against the last pier on the right before the crossing sits a bronze Peter enthroned, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding the keys. It is usually attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio in the late thirteenth century, though some scholars argue for a far older, fifth-century date. The argument is academic next to the obvious fact about it: the right foot has been kissed and stroked by so many people for so many centuries that the toes are gone and the front of the foot is a smooth stump. On feast days the statue is dressed in papal robes and a tiara.

Bernini's baldachin

The bronze canopy over the high altar is 28.7 metres tall — as high as an eight-storey building, standing inside a room, and still generally called the largest bronze structure of its kind anywhere. Bernini built it between 1623 and 1634 for Urban VIII, whose Barberini bees crawl up the twisted columns among the laurel.

Some of the bronze came from the portico roof of the Pantheon, stripped on Urban's orders, which produced the Roman line quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini — what the barbarians didn't do, the Barberini did. The columns are “Solomonic,” twisted in imitation of the columns believed to have come from the Temple in Jerusalem; the originals, or the ones so identified, are set into the balconies of the four piers around you.

The confessio, and what is underneath it

In front of the altar the floor opens into a sunken horseshoe lit by 95 bronze lamps, with a double staircase leading down. This is the confessio, and it exists to point at something: directly below is the spot the church was built to cover.

Excavations ordered by Pius XII, carried out in secret from 1939, found a Roman street of tombs under the crypt and, beneath a second-century shrine, a niche containing bones wrapped in cloth of purple and gold. Pius XII announced the tomb in 1950; Paul VI declared the bones identified in 1968, in careful language that stopped short of proof. You can walk the excavation on the Scavi tour, which takes small groups, must be booked directly with the Excavations Office weeks or months ahead, and does not admit under-15s.

The dome from directly beneath

Stand under the crossing and look up. Around the base runs Christ's charge to Peter in gold on blue — TU ES PETRUS ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM: you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. The letters are the size of a person. Above them the dome climbs through six registers of mosaic to the lantern, and the whole 41.5-metre span rests on sixteen stone ribs and a double shell — the trick Brunelleschi worked out in Florence and Michelangelo took further here.

St Longinus, and the four relic piers

The four piers carrying the dome each hold a colossal statue and, in the balcony above it, a relic. Bernini's St Longinus of 1639 is the one people photograph: the centurion who pierced Christ's side, arms flung wide at the moment of belief, the spear in his right hand. The others are Helena with the True Cross by Andrea Bolgi, Veronica with her veil by Francesco Mochi, and Andrew with his X-shaped cross by François Duquesnoy. Each statue is about five metres tall and stands directly beneath the relic it is holding.

The Cathedra Petri

Keep walking to the far end. The apse is filled by Bernini's Chair of St Peter, unveiled on 16 January 1666: a bronze throne apparently floating, carried by four Doctors of the Church — Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, John Chrysostom — whose fingertips barely touch it. Inside the bronze is an actual wooden chair, an early medieval object long venerated as Peter's own.

Above it is the one piece of theatre in the building that everyone notices and few people examine: a window of yellow alabaster with a dove at its centre, so that on a bright afternoon the light appears to be coming out of the church rather than into it. Bernini designed the gilt rays and the surrounding cloud of stucco angels to make exactly that reading unavoidable.

The tomb of Alexander VII

In the transept near the apse, over a doorway, is the last thing Bernini designed for the basilica, finished when he was over eighty. The pope kneels in prayer. Beneath him a vast marble drapery, in mottled Sicilian jasper, is being lifted from below by a gilded bronze skeleton holding up an hourglass. The doorway underneath is a real, working door, which is the joke: Death comes out of it. It is worth the detour even if you skip everything else on this side of the church.

The Monument to the Royal Stuarts

Left aisle, near the entrance. Canova's monument, paid for in part by George IV of Britain, commemorates James Francis Edward Stuart — the Old Pretender — and his sons Charles Edward, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Henry Benedict, Cardinal Duke of York. Two winged genii lean on reversed torches beside a sealed door. The last claimants to the British throne of the House of Stuart died in Rome under papal protection and are buried in the crypt below. Opposite is the monument to Maria Clementina Sobieska, the Old Pretender's wife; and further along, one of the very few women buried in the basilica, Queen Christina of Sweden, who abdicated her throne in 1654 to convert to Catholicism.

The Vatican Grottoes

The crypt runs beneath the nave at the floor level of Constantine's basilica, and it is free. Ninety-one popes are buried in the church, most of them down here — John Paul II's tomb was moved up to the chapel of St Sebastian in the main church after his beatification, but John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and Benedict XVI are among those below. Fragments of the old basilica are set into the walls. The entrance moves depending on crowd management, usually a stair by one of the crossing piers, and it exits outside the church — so do the grottoes last, or you will queue through security a second time.

Climbing the dome

The dome is the one thing here you pay for, and it is a separate ticket, separate entrance and separate queue from the basilica. Two options: 551 steps all the way on foot, or the lift to the terrace and 320 steps after it. The lift does not take you to the top and nobody can carry you the rest of the way; the final stretch is a narrow, one-way, curving staircase between the inner and outer shells, where the wall leans over with the curve of the dome and there is a rope down the middle to hold. It is not a place to discover that you dislike enclosed spaces.

Two things people don't expect. First, the route passes out onto an interior gallery just above the mosaic level, so you look down into the church from inside the drum before you go up — for many people the best view of the day. Second, the terrace has a café and a lavatory, which matters more than it sounds by the time you get there.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• Michelangelo's Pietà First chapel on the right, thirty seconds inside the door, and easy to walk straight past.
• The worn foot of the bronze St Peter Seven centuries of hands, on the last pier before the crossing.
• Bernini's baldachin and the Pantheon's bronze Twenty-nine metres of it, over the high altar.
• The Cathedra Petri and its alabaster window Best in mid-afternoon, when the sun is behind it.
• Alexander VII's tomb Bernini at eighty, with Death coming out from under the drapery.
• The floor markers in the nave Where the world's other great cathedrals would end.

Insider tips

Go at opening or in the last ninety minutes; the middle of the day is when the tour groups and the screening queue collide. The dress code is enforced at the door, not politely — covered shoulders and knees, for everyone, in any weather — and a scarf in a bag has saved a lot of visits. Do the dome before the interior if you are climbing: the stairs get slower as the day fills. Wednesday mornings are papal audience days on the square and the basilica opens late or restricts access; check before you build a morning around it.

Where to stay and eat nearby

The Borgo, the district immediately east of the square, is convenient and mostly a tourist trap for food. Walk ten minutes north into Prati, a residential grid of good Roman restaurants and decent coffee, or cross the river into the centro storico. Staying in Prati puts you within walking distance of the basilica and on the Metro line to everything else.

More Rome and Vatican churches

• The Sistine Chapel — Michelangelo's ceiling, through the Vatican Museums next door.
• The Pantheon — the building St Peter's was measured against, and the source of its bronze.
• St John Lateran — the Pope's actual cathedral, and the older of the two.
• San Clemente — the other Roman church built over its own excavated past.

See all the churches in this Rome guide →