Rome Pilgrimage Sites for Catholics

1. Why Rome Is a Pilgrimage City

Rome became a destination for Christian pilgrims for one reason: Peter and Paul were executed in the city under Nero, in the mid sixties of the first century, and the Christians of Rome knew where the two bodies lay. Everything else in pilgrim Rome, the basilicas, the catacombs, the relic chapels, the jubilees, grew outward from those two graves. A pilgrim who keeps that in view will read the city correctly. A pilgrim who treats Rome as a list of famous buildings will spend a week walking past the point.

The written trail is unusually early. Paul's letter to the Romans is addressed to a Christian community already established in the capital before he ever saw it (Romans 1:7). Acts ends with Paul arriving in Rome and living two years under guard, welcoming all who came to him (Acts 28:16, 28:30). Writing to Timothy near the end, Paul describes himself as already being poured out like a libation, with the time of his departure at hand (2 Timothy 4:6). The First Letter of Peter closes with greetings from the church at Babylon, an image the Fathers read as Rome (1 Peter 5:13).

The Trophies of the Apostles

Around the year 200 a Roman presbyter named Gaius wrote a line that pilgrims have been quoting ever since. Eusebius preserves it in his Ecclesiastical History (2.25): Gaius says he can point out the trophies of the apostles, one on the Vatican hill and one on the road to Ostia, and that these mark the founders of the Roman church. Two locations, named as monuments a visitor could be taken to see, within about a century and a half of the deaths. Both sites carry a papal basilica today, and both stand where Gaius said the memorials stood.

Roman law forbade burial inside the city walls, which is why the apostles' graves and the catacombs all lie outside the ancient perimeter, along the roads leading out. That single legal fact explains the shape of pilgrim Rome better than any other: the oldest holy places are on the edges, and the medieval city grew toward them rather than the other way round. Walking out along the Via Appia or the Via Ostiense to a church, and walking back, is the original Roman pilgrimage movement.

What the Church Says a Pilgrimage Is

The Catechism treats pilgrimage as a form of popular piety, listing it alongside the veneration of relics, visits to sanctuaries and processions among the expressions of Christian devotion that surround the sacramental life (CCC 1674), and it says that pilgrimages evoke our earthly journey toward heaven (CCC 2691). Nothing in that makes a journey to Rome necessary for any Catholic. Pilgrimage is offered, and it works the way bodily things work in a sacramental religion: place, distance, effort and time do something to a person that reading does not. Our guide to what a pilgrimage is and why Catholics make them sets out the theology in full.

2. The Four Papal Basilicas

Four churches in Rome hold a rank no other church in the world holds. They are St John Lateran, St Peter's in the Vatican, St Paul Outside the Walls, and Santa Maria Maggiore. Each has a papal altar, each has a Holy Door opened in a jubilee year, and each is served by a college of confessors under the Apostolic Penitentiary. Pilgrims often call them the four major basilicas, and the Vatican yearbook has used the title papal basilica for them since 2006, replacing the older description patriarchal basilica.

The change of title from patriarchal basilica to papal basilica appears in the 2006 edition of the Annuario Pontificio, the Holy See's yearbook. The Latin phrase quoted below from the facade of St John Lateran is the inscription on the building itself.

St John Lateran: The Cathedral of Rome

Start here, and the whole city falls into order. St John Lateran is the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome, which makes it the pope's own cathedral and outranks St Peter's in dignity, a fact that surprises most visitors. The inscription across the facade states the claim plainly: omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput, mother and head of all the churches of the city and of the world. Its full dedication is to the Most Holy Savior and to Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, which is why Romans call it San Giovanni and the books call it the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior.

The foundation goes back to Constantine in the early fourth century, on land that had belonged to the Laterani family and then held the barracks of the imperial horse guard. Nothing you see is Constantine's. The building burned, fell, was sacked and rebuilt across fifteen centuries, and the interior you walk into was reworked by Francesco Borromini in the 1640s, with the tall east facade by Alessandro Galilei finished in 1735. Twelve colossal apostle statues stand in the nave niches. Over the papal altar rises a Gothic ciborium of the 1360s, and the reliquary busts set in it are traditionally said to hold the heads of Peter and Paul. Alongside stands the octagonal Lateran Baptistery, the model that shaped baptisteries across the Latin west, and behind the church a thirteenth-century cloister with twisted mosaic columns that is the quietest place in that end of Rome.

The feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica falls on 9 November and is kept by the whole Latin Church, Rome included. Popes lived beside this church for roughly a thousand years, until the Avignon period and its aftermath moved the papal household across the Tiber to the Vatican. Standing in the Lateran with that in mind changes the way St Peter's reads.

St Peter's in the Vatican

St Peter's stands over the burial place venerated since the second century as the grave of the apostle Peter, on the Vatican hill where Gaius pointed to a trophy. Constantine's basilica went up there in the fourth century and was replaced by the present church between 1506 and 1626. Papal liturgies are celebrated there through the year, and the building takes a long visit rather than a short one. The interior has a guide of its own on this site: see St Peter's Basilica and what to see inside it, which covers the tomb, the art and the order in which to walk the church.

Santa Maria Maggiore

Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline hill is the great Marian basilica of Rome and the one that carries the Council of Ephesus in its stones. Sixtus III rebuilt it in the 430s, immediately after the council of 431 defined Mary as Theotokos, God-bearer, and the fifth-century mosaics that run along the nave and across the triumphal arch belong to that rebuilding. They are among the oldest narrative mosaic cycles in any Roman church, Old Testament scenes down the nave and the infancy of Christ on the arch.

The basilica holds the icon called Salus Populi Romani, Salvation of the Roman People, a much-venerated image of the Virgin and Child that popes have prayed before for centuries, and beneath the high altar a reliquary containing wood venerated as fragments of the crib of Bethlehem. A tradition first recorded centuries after the fact tells of a summer snowfall marking out the ground plan, and the church keeps the memory each year on 5 August with the feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major. Gian Lorenzo Bernini is buried here without ceremony, under a plain slab near the sanctuary. Pope Francis was buried in this basilica in April 2025, in the aisle near the icon he visited before and after every journey.

St Paul Outside the Walls

The fourth papal basilica stands outside the Aurelian walls along the Via Ostiense, over the grave of Paul. Getting out there takes deliberate effort, which is part of what makes the visit a pilgrimage rather than a stop. The next section treats it on its own.

3. The Tomb of Paul on the Ostian Way

San Paolo fuori le Mura, St Paul Outside the Walls, marks the spot where Roman Christians buried Paul after his execution. Constantine raised a small church over the grave, and from 386 the emperors Theodosius, Valentinian II and Arcadius replaced it with a vast five-aisled basilica that stood, largely intact, for almost fifteen centuries. On the night of 15 July 1823 a workman's brazier set the roof alight and the fire destroyed most of the ancient church. What stands now is the nineteenth-century rebuilding, consecrated by Pius IX in 1854, made deliberately in the old proportions.

The rebuilt basilica is cold and immense and grows on you. Above the columns of the nave runs a frieze of mosaic medallions with the portrait of every pope from Peter onward, continued as each new pope is elected, so a pilgrim can walk the whole succession in one line around the church. Pieces of the old basilica survived and were kept: the fifth-century mosaic on the triumphal arch, given by the empress Galla Placidia, the apse mosaic commissioned under Honorius III in the early thirteenth century and made by Venetian mosaicists, the marble ciborium carved by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1285 over the tomb itself, the great sculpted paschal candlestick of the Vassalletto workshop, and the thirteenth-century cloister, which is one of the loveliest enclosed spaces in Rome.

The Sarcophagus and What Was Found in It

Under the papal altar, visible through an opening in front of the Confessio, lies a rough stone sarcophagus. Set into the pavement above it is a marble slab pierced with holes, carrying the inscription PAVLO APOSTOLO MART, to Paul, apostle and martyr, in lettering assigned to the fourth century. Excavations conducted at the basilica in the first years of this century exposed the sarcophagus, and on 28 June 2009, preaching at First Vespers for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Benedict XVI reported that a probe inserted into the sealed coffin had brought out fragments of bone which radiocarbon testing dated to the first or second century, along with traces of purple linen and grains of incense.

The description of the probe and the dating comes from Benedict XVI's homily at First Vespers of the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, 28 June 2009, published by the Holy See. The pope described the finding as confirming the unanimous and uncontested tradition that the bones belong to Paul; the Church has defined nothing about the relics as an article of faith.

Read Paul's letters to the Romans, Philippians and Second Timothy before you go, and the visit does something that no amount of guiding can produce. The man who wrote that he had finished the race is under that slab, and the Church has never had a rival claim about where he lies. A short way further out from the basilica, at the Abbey of Tre Fontane, a monastery marks the traditional site of the beheading itself, on the road where a Roman citizen would have been executed by the sword rather than crucified. Our guide to St Paul, apostle to the Gentiles covers his life and letters.

4. The Seven Pilgrim Churches

The visit of the seven churches, la visita delle sette chiese, is Rome's own homemade pilgrimage: a walking circuit that strings the four papal basilicas together with three older martyr churches. The seven are St Peter's, St Paul Outside the Walls, St John Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and San Sebastiano fuori le Mura on the Appian Way. Done on foot in one day, the loop runs to something like twenty kilometres and takes from before dawn until evening.

Philip Neri and the Invention of a Joyful Route

The custom of visiting these churches is medieval, and its popular form is the work of one priest. Philip Neri, who founded the Oratory and spent his life in Rome, took his companions round the seven churches from the 1550s onward and turned an act of penance into something closer to a feast: walking, singing, praying at each station, stopping for a meal with music in the open air, and finishing at night. He died on 26 May 1595 and was canonized in 1622. The walk caught on in Rome during the carnival season, precisely because Neri had offered it as an alternative to the carnival.

Two of the seven are less known and both are worth the walk. San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, on the Via Tiburtina beside the Verano cemetery, stands over the tomb of the deacon Lawrence, martyred in 258, and is really two churches of different centuries joined end to end. Allied bombs struck it on 19 July 1943 in the raid on the San Lorenzo district, and it was rebuilt from the surviving fabric; Pius IX is buried there at his own request. San Sebastiano fuori le Mura on the Appian Way sits above the catacomb complex where, for a period in the third century, the memory of Peter and Paul was kept, and pilgrims scratched invocations to the two apostles on the walls of a triclia there, graffiti still legible today.

For the Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II designated the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Divine Love, on the southern edge of Rome, as a station of the pilgrim route, and in some listings of the seven churches it appears in place of San Sebastiano. Both versions are current. Neither is official in any binding sense, since the circuit is a devotion rather than a law.

5. The Catacombs

The catacombs are the cemeteries of the Roman church, cut as galleries into the soft volcanic tufa outside the walls, mostly between the second and the fifth centuries. Bodies were laid in shelf-like niches called loculi stacked along the corridors and sealed with tile or marble, with wealthier families paying for chambers, arched arcosolium graves and painted decoration. The systems run for miles on several levels. Roman law banned burial within the city, and land outside was expensive, so digging down and outward was the affordable answer.

What the Catacombs Were Not

The picture of Christians hiding underground from persecution and living secretly in the tunnels is a nineteenth-century romance. Everyone in Rome knew where the cemeteries were; they were registered burial property, and in periods of persecution the authorities confiscated them precisely because they were public. What Christians did there was bury their dead, mark the graves of martyrs, and gather at those graves on the anniversary of a martyr's death for prayer and the Eucharist. That practice, the funeral meal transfigured into the memorial of a martyr, is the origin of the calendar of saints and of the custom of building altars over relics.

Rome's Christian catacombs are cared for by the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, established by Pius IX in 1852, and a small number are open to pilgrims with a guide. The ones a visitor is most likely to see are these.

Descriptions above follow the published accounts of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which administers the Christian catacombs of Rome. Attributions of individual paintings, and the identification of particular graves, are the readings of archaeologists rather than definitions of the Church.

Go down with a specific intention rather than a camera. The art is small, dim and mostly symbolic: the Good Shepherd carrying a sheep, a fish, an anchor, Jonah, Noah in his box, the raising of Lazarus, a woman standing with arms raised in prayer. These are the images of a Church that expected the resurrection of the body and painted its hope on the walls of its graves. Reading the names scratched by hand into plaster, with the ages of children given in months, does more for faith in ten minutes than most books.

6. Santa Croce and the Relics of the Passion

Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, sits at the eastern edge of Rome a short walk from the Lateran, built into the ruins of the Sessorian Palace where Helena, the mother of Constantine, lived. Tradition holds that Helena brought relics of the Passion back from Jerusalem in the 320s and that earth from Calvary was laid beneath the floor of the hall she converted into a chapel, which is why a church in Rome is named for Jerusalem. The dedication is old; the yellow baroque front you see was added in the 1740s.

The Chapel of the Relics

A modern chapel at the end of the left aisle, built in 1930, displays what the basilica keeps. Behind glass are fragments of wood venerated as belonging to the Cross, one of the nails, two thorns, a piece of wood identified by tradition as the crossbeam from the cross of the good thief, the finger bone venerated as that of the apostle Thomas, and a wooden panel known as the Titulus Crucis, part of an inscription in Hebrew, Greek and Latin letters, the board that carried the charge against Jesus (compare John 19:19-20). The chapel is silent, small and usually nearly empty.

Radiocarbon analysis of the Titulus wood was published in the journal Radiocarbon in 2002 by F. Bella and C. Azzi, who dated the sample to roughly the tenth to twelfth centuries. Some scholars have argued that this dates a later copy or a repaired backing rather than the original inscription, and the palaeography of the letters has been read as much earlier. The honest position is that the object's origin is disputed.

The dating figure above is from F. Bella and C. Azzi, published in Radiocarbon volume 44 (2002). The Catholic Church has never defined the authenticity of any relic. Veneration of a relic is directed to the Lord and to the saints, and it does not depend on a laboratory result.

7. The Scala Santa

Across the road from the Lateran basilica stands a building whose whole purpose is a staircase. The Scala Santa is a flight of twenty-eight marble steps which tradition, again attached to Helena, identifies as the stairs of Pilate's praetorium in Jerusalem, climbed by Christ during the Passion. Sixtus V had them moved to their present position in 1589, in a building designed by Domenico Fontana, so that they lead up to the Sancta Sanctorum, the old private chapel of the popes, which holds an ancient icon of Christ called acheiropoieton, made without hands.

Pilgrims ascend the Scala Santa on their knees, one step at a time, praying at each. Nobody walks up it; there are ordinary staircases on either side for that. The marble has been protected by walnut treads since the eighteenth century, and a restoration completed in 2019 exposed the bare stone for a period before the wooden covering was replaced. The climb takes fifteen or twenty minutes if it is done properly, and it hurts, which is the point of a penitential practice rather than a defect in it.

A story often told in Protestant accounts has the young Martin Luther climbing these stairs during his visit to Rome and turning back in doubt. The anecdote comes from a later report by his son Paul rather than from Luther's own writings, and historians treat it with caution. Whatever happened on the staircase, Luther's break with Rome grew out of his reading of Scripture and his objections to the practice of indulgences.

8. San Clemente and Its Three Levels

San Clemente, on the road between the Colosseum and the Lateran, is the single best place in Rome to understand how the city works vertically. Three buildings sit stacked under one roof, each below the last, and a pilgrim can walk down through them in twenty minutes.

Level One: The Twelfth-Century Basilica

The church at street level was built after Norman troops under Robert Guiscard devastated this quarter of Rome in 1084. It keeps a marble choir enclosure reused from the older church below, a Cosmatesque pavement, and in the apse one of the great mosaics of medieval Europe: a golden cross set in a spreading acanthus scroll that runs out across the whole vault, with deer, birds, doctors of the Church and small human figures in the coils, the Cross shown as the tree of life.

Level Two: The Fourth-Century Church

Below it lies the basilica it replaced, in use from the fourth century, with wall paintings from the ninth to the eleventh. One of them shows a Roman named Sisinnius ordering his servants to drag away Pope Clement and includes a caption of coarse speech written in an early form of vernacular Italian, one of the oldest surviving examples of the language written down. Saint Cyril, who with his brother Methodius brought the Gospel and a written alphabet to the Slavs, died in Rome in 869 and was buried in this lower church; Slavic pilgrims still come for that.

Level Three: The House and the Mithraeum

Lower again are first-century Roman structures, including a house and, in a narrow vaulted room, a temple of Mithras with its stone benches and an altar carved with the god killing a bull. A spring of water runs somewhere in the dark, audible before it is seen. Standing in a mystery cult's dining room with a Christian basilica two floors overhead is the most compressed history lesson in Rome. Irish Dominicans have served San Clemente since 1667 and carried out the excavations from 1857 under Father Joseph Mullooly.

9. The Pantheon as Santa Maria ad Martyres

The Pantheon is a working Catholic parish church, and its proper name is the Basilica of Santa Maria ad Martyres, Saint Mary and the Martyrs. Agrippa built the first temple on the site under Augustus and Hadrian rebuilt it in the form now standing, in the 120s, with a concrete dome open at the crown and a portico of monolithic granite columns. The Byzantine emperor Phocas gave the building to Pope Boniface IV, who dedicated it as a church, by tradition on 13 May 609, and the conversion is the reason the structure survived when almost every other Roman temple was quarried away.

The dedication tells you what to look for. Boniface consecrated the building to the Virgin and to the martyrs, and later accounts describe cartloads of bones brought in from the catacombs and laid beneath the altar. The old shrine of all the gods was given to the men and women who had been killed for refusing them. Walk in expecting a church: there is an altar, a tabernacle, side chapels, an icon of the Virgin above the apse, and Mass is celebrated. The oculus is open to the sky, so rain falls into the building and drains through holes in the ancient floor.

Two kinds of tomb share the rotunda. Raphael is buried here, with the epitaph written for him by Pietro Bembo, and near him lie the first two kings of a united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II and Umberto I, which explains the guards sometimes standing by. Come at an hour when the tour groups are thin, if you can find one, and stay for the light coming down the shaft.

10. Twelve Smaller Churches Worth the Detour

Rome has hundreds of churches, and a pilgrim cannot see them and should not try. These twelve repay a deliberate visit, and each is chosen for something a pilgrim can pray in front of rather than for architectural interest alone.

Near the Forum and the Esquiline

San Pietro in Vincoli holds, in a reliquary under the high altar, the chains venerated as those that bound Peter in prison, the two sets traditionally from Jerusalem and Rome; the same church has Michelangelo's Moses, carved for the unfinished tomb of Julius II. Santa Prassede, a few steps from Santa Maria Maggiore, contains the Chapel of San Zeno, a small room lined with ninth-century gold mosaic, and a column brought from Jerusalem in 1223 and venerated as the pillar of the flagellation. Santi Quattro Coronati, a fortified convent on the hill toward the Lateran, is enclosed, silent and holds a thirteenth-century fresco cycle in the Chapel of St Sylvester.

In the Historic Centre

Santa Maria sopra Minerva, behind the Pantheon, keeps the body of Catherine of Siena under the high altar, her head having remained at Siena, and the tomb of Fra Angelico is in the same church. The Gesu, mother church of the Society of Jesus, holds the tomb of Ignatius of Loyola in the left transept and, opposite, a reliquary containing the arm of Francis Xavier. San Luigi dei Francesi has Caravaggio's three paintings on the life of Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel, including the calling of the tax collector, which is a better sermon on vocation than most sermons. Santa Maria in Cosmedin, best known to tourists for the drain cover called the Mouth of Truth in its portico, is a serene medieval church with a schola cantorum and relics venerated as those of Saint Valentine.

Across the Tiber and Beyond the Walls

Santa Maria in Trastevere, among the oldest churches in Rome dedicated to the Virgin, carries twelfth-century apse mosaics and a lower band of scenes from her life by Pietro Cavallini. San Bartolomeo all'Isola, on the Tiber island, was entrusted by John Paul II in 2000 as the memorial of the New Martyrs, and its side altars hold objects belonging to Christians killed for the faith in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from many countries and several communions. Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura on the Via Nomentana stands over the grave of the martyr Agnes, with the mosaic-lined mausoleum of Constantina beside it. Tre Fontane, the Trappist abbey on the way to the sea, marks the traditional site of Paul's beheading. Domine Quo Vadis, a tiny church where the Appian Way begins its run south, marks the spot of the legend from the apocryphal Acts of Peter in which Peter, fleeing Rome, meets Christ walking in and turns back to die in the city.

11. Holy Doors and Jubilee Years

Each of the four papal basilicas has a Holy Door, kept walled or bolted shut and opened only in a jubilee year, when pilgrims pass through it as a sign of entering by Christ, who calls himself the gate of the sheepfold (John 10:9). Passing through a Holy Door is one of the works attached to the jubilee indulgence, along with sacramental confession, Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope, and a work of mercy or penance. The rest of the time the doors are simply part of the wall, and most visitors walk past them without noticing.

Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Holy Year in 1300, and ordinary jubilees have been kept at intervals of twenty-five years for centuries, with extraordinary jubilees called from time to time for particular reasons. The most recent ordinary jubilee was the Holy Year of 2025, whose bull of indiction Spes non confundit took its title from Romans 5:5, hope does not disappoint, and set the opening of the Holy Door of St Peter's for 24 December 2024 and its closing for 6 January 2026. Our guide to the Jubilee of 2025 and the Pilgrims of Hope covers the indulgence, the conditions and the theology of jubilee in detail.

What This Means for a Visit in an Ordinary Year

Outside a jubilee, the Holy Doors stay shut, and nothing about a Roman pilgrimage depends on them. The indulgences attached to visiting the papal basilicas, and to the ordinary conditions of confession, Communion and prayer for the pope, do not require a Holy Year. A pilgrim in an ordinary September gets the same graves and the same altars.

12. How a Pilgrim Plans Days by District

The mistake almost every first-time pilgrim makes is to build a list of buildings and then try to connect them. Rome punishes that immediately, because the holy places sit in tight geographical clusters with long gaps between the clusters, and because a church visited in a hurry gives nothing. Plan by district and by half-day, one anchor church in the morning, one or two smaller churches near it, and a long afternoon gap. The shape below is a working skeleton; the number of days is yours.

Three Rules That Save a Roman Pilgrimage

One anchor a day. A papal basilica deserves at least two hours and will take more. Two in a day is possible; three turns them into corridors. Leave a gap in the middle of the day. Roman churches keep their own rhythms of opening and closing, and each one posts its own, so check the church you want before setting out and use the gap for a meal, a rest or the walk out to the next district. Cover shoulders and knees. The papal basilicas apply a dress code at the door, and a scarf carried in a bag solves it.

Distance is the other thing people underestimate. St Paul Outside the Walls and the Appian Way catacombs are genuinely out of town, San Lorenzo is on the far side of Termini, and the Lateran group is a long walk from the Vatican. Pair the outlying sites with each other rather than sandwiching them between central ones. If mobility is limited, drop the seven churches walk and keep the four basilicas, which are all reachable without long distances on foot inside the grounds.

13. Mass, Confession and Silence in a Loud City

A pilgrimage is a set of prayers with a route attached. Rome will happily absorb a week and give back nothing but photographs, so decide in advance what the days are for. Three practices carry the weight.

Daily Mass, and Where

Mass is celebrated many times a day in the papal basilicas and in most parish churches, and the early morning liturgies in the side chapels of St Peter's and Santa Maria Maggiore are quiet, unhurried and attended mostly by people who live there. Going to Mass at the tomb of an apostle is the specific thing Rome offers that no other city does, and it is free. If the language is a problem, the shape of the Roman rite is the same everywhere and the readings can be looked up beforehand; our guide to the structure of the Mass lays out the parts.

Confession

The four papal basilicas are served by colleges of confessors appointed under the Apostolic Penitentiary, and they hear confessions in many languages, marked at the boxes. For many pilgrims this is the heart of the trip and the one thing they cannot get so easily at home: an unhurried confession, in their own language, in a church built over a martyr. Plan it for early in the visit rather than the last morning.

Silence

Every basilica has somewhere quiet, and finding it is a skill. The cloisters at St Paul Outside the Walls and the Lateran, the Chapel of the Relics at Santa Croce, the lower church at San Clemente, the Blessed Sacrament chapels signed for prayer in the large basilicas. Ten minutes of silence in one of those places will outlast the rest of the day's memories. Bring a rosary and use the walking time, which is how the seven churches route was designed to work in the first place; our guide to praying the rosary covers the mysteries if you want a plan for the week.

14. Mistakes First-Time Pilgrims Make

Some of these are logistical and some are spiritual, and the logistical ones cause the spiritual ones.

Packing the days. Six churches in a day produces exhaustion and no prayer. Cut the list by half before you leave home, and cut it again on day three when you know your own pace.

Treating St Peter's as the whole pilgrimage. The Vatican is one district of a city with four papal basilicas, a catacomb system and the grave of a second apostle. Pilgrims who spend four days inside the Vatican walls have seen a great church and missed Rome.

Skipping the Lateran. The cathedral of the pope is routinely left off itineraries because the name is unfamiliar. It is the mother church of the world and one of the four Holy Doors.

Chasing relics as curiosities. A tour of reliquaries with no confession, no Mass and no silence is museum-going with a religious theme. Anchor each day on a sacrament and the relics fall into place around it.

Arriving cold. Reading Romans, Acts 27 and 28, and Second Timothy before the trip changes San Paolo fuori le Mura from a big cold building into the end of a story you have been following. The same is true of reading about the martyrs before going down into a catacomb.

Forgetting the people you left. Traditional pilgrims carried the intentions of their village. Ask before you go what people want prayed for, write the list down, and take it to the tombs. It costs nothing and it turns a holiday into an errand for somebody else.

15. Frequently Asked Questions