1. What St Peter's Basilica Is
St Peter's Basilica is a church in Vatican City built directly above a grave that Roman Christians were already honouring as the apostle Peter's in the second century. Everything else about the building follows from that one fact. The altar stands where it stands because the grave is underneath it. The dome rises where it rises because the altar is under it. The square outside was shaped to hold the crowds that come to the grave. A visitor who grasps the sequence understands the church in five minutes; a visitor who does not will spend two hours admiring marble and leave without the point.
The building is a papal basilica, which means it belongs to the pope and is used for the liturgies of his office. Conclaves end with an announcement from its central balcony. Canonisations, Christmas midnight Mass, the Easter Vigil and the funerals of popes happen here. The high altar is reserved to the pope, or to a priest he permits, and no one else celebrates at it.
Two corrections are worth making before you go. St Peter's is not the cathedral of Rome. That is the Archbasilica of St John Lateran across the city, which holds the pope's chair as Bishop of Rome and carries the title mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world. And St Peter's is not the mother church of the world's Catholics in any legal sense either. Its authority over the imagination comes from the bones under the floor and from the office of the man buried there, which the guide to the papacy and the office of Peter takes up in full.
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Get Pro for $49 One-time payment. Lifetime access. 30-day money-back guarantee.2. Why the Church Is Here
The Vatican hill was an unpromising place for a church. In the first century it lay outside the city walls, across the Tiber from Rome proper, a district of gardens, a circus begun by Caligula and used by Nero, and a roadside cemetery running up the slope. Constantine's engineers had to cut into that hillside and buttress it at enormous cost in order to build on it. Nobody puts a basilica there by choice. They built there because of what was in the ground.
The Written Evidence
Christian writers put Peter's death in Rome under Nero. The First Letter of Clement, written from Rome in the last years of the first century, speaks of Peter and Paul as pillars of the Church who suffered and went to the place of glory, without saying where. Tacitus, a pagan historian with no interest in helping Christians, records Nero's persecution after the fire of 64 and the executions carried out in his gardens and circus on the Vatican (Annals 15.44). By the end of the second century the presbyter Gaius could challenge an opponent by pointing at monuments: he says he can show the trophies of the apostles, Peter's on the Vatican and Paul's on the road to Ostia, a passage preserved by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (2.25.7). The tradition that Peter asked to be crucified head downward comes later, through Origen as quoted by Eusebius, and it is a tradition rather than an eyewitness report.
Scripture itself gives the frame the Roman Church read those events by.
"And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven."
Matthew 16:18-19John's Gospel adds the charge given after the Resurrection, feed my sheep, and immediately afterwards a saying about how Peter would die, stretching out his hands and being led where he would not choose to go, which the evangelist explains as an indication of the death by which Peter would glorify God (John 21:15-19). The Catechism sets Peter's place in the Church on that ground rather than on the archaeology (CCC 552). For the man himself, see the guide to Simon Peter, the fisherman given the keys.
What Lies Under the Altar
Excavations beneath the basilica between 1940 and 1949, under Pope Pius XII, opened the Roman cemetery that Constantine's builders had buried and found, directly under the high altar, a small niched monument of about the year 160 set against a red wall. That monument matches what Gaius said he could show. The excavated necropolis belongs to its own subject, taken up in the guide to the tomb of St Peter and the Vatican Scavi. What matters standing in the nave is the claim and its limits: the memorial site is very well attested, the Church holds that relics of the apostle are there, and the identification of particular bones has been argued over by archaeologists ever since. Section 9 sets out what was announced and by whom.
3. Constantine's Basilica and Its Replacement
The first church on the site went up in the fourth century under the Emperor Constantine, who cut away part of the hillside, filled and levelled the necropolis, and set a five-aisled basilica across it with its altar over the shrine. Old St Peter's stood for about twelve hundred years. It was where Charlemagne was crowned on Christmas Day of the year 800, where emperors and popes were buried, and where medieval pilgrims came in numbers that Rome built whole quarters to house.
By the fifteenth century the old basilica was leaning and failing. Nicholas V began strengthening work. In 1505 Julius II decided on demolition and replacement, and on 18 April 1506 he laid the foundation stone of a new church to Bramante's design, a Greek cross under a dome. What followed was a building project that ran for a hundred and twenty years, with the plan changing repeatedly as architects died in office.
| Stage | Who | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| From 1506 | Donato Bramante | Central plan on a Greek cross, four vast piers set to carry a dome |
| From 1514 | Raphael, then Antonio da Sangallo the Younger | Plan pulled towards a long nave, then reworked again |
| From 1546 | Michelangelo | Return to the central plan, piers strengthened, the dome designed |
| 1588 to 1590 | Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana | The dome built and closed, steeper than Michelangelo's model |
| From 1607 | Carlo Maderno | Nave extended eastward to a Latin cross, the facade built |
| 1620s to 1660s | Gian Lorenzo Bernini | Baldachin, confessio, Cathedra Petri, the piazza and colonnade |
Pope Urban VIII consecrated the finished church on 18 November 1626, the anniversary of the dedication of Constantine's basilica. The Roman calendar still keeps 18 November as the feast of the dedication of the basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul.
4. The Piazza and Bernini's Colonnade
St Peter's Square is Bernini's, built for Alexander VII between 1656 and 1667. Two curved arms of colonnade sweep out from the church and close around an oval, each arm four rows of plain Doric columns deep, carrying an entablature and a balustrade lined with statues of saints. Bernini is reported to have described the design as the arms of the Church reaching out to embrace Catholics, to draw back those who had left, and to invite everyone else. The shape does exactly what he said. You feel gathered in.
The counts and dimensions of the colonnade given below follow the Vatican's own published description of the square. Older guidebooks vary by a few, because they differ over whether to count the pilasters and the columns of the straight sections that join the colonnade to the facade.
The colonnades carry some two hundred and eighty-four columns and eighty-eight pilasters, and about a hundred and forty statues stand on the balustrade above them, each around three metres tall and carved by Bernini's workshop rather than by his own hand. Set into the pavement on either side of the obelisk are two round porphyry markers. Stand on one and look at the colonnade on that side: the four rows of columns line up so exactly that they collapse into a single row. The trick is deliberate, and it is worth walking out to find the disc.
The Obelisk
The red granite obelisk at the centre carries no hieroglyphs. It was quarried in Egypt, brought to Rome by Caligula, and set on the spine of the circus on the Vatican, which means it is the one object on the site that certainly stood there during the persecution under Nero. It was moved to the centre of the square in 1586 for Sixtus V by Domenico Fontana, in an operation involving hundreds of men, horses and windlasses that Rome talked about for a century. Sixtus had it crowned with a cross and exorcised of its pagan use. If you want to look at a thing that saw what happened to the Christians of Rome, look at that.
5. The Facade and the Loggia of the Blessings
Carlo Maderno's facade, finished in 1612, is a wide screen of travertine with giant Corinthian columns and an attic storey above. Across the entablature runs an inscription in Latin naming Paul V Borghese, Roman, Supreme Pontiff, in the year 1612, the seventh of his pontificate, as the builder in honour of the prince of the apostles. Roman critics have complained for four centuries that it is too wide for its height and that it hides the dome. Both complaints are true and neither matters much when the square in front of it is full.
On the balustrade above stand thirteen colossal statues: Christ the Redeemer in the centre with a cross, John the Baptist beside him, and eleven of the apostles. Peter is missing from the group. He and Paul stand instead at the foot of the steps below, in the two large nineteenth-century statues that face the square, Peter holding the keys with his hand raised and Paul with a sword. The arrangement is a piece of theology in stone: the apostle whose church this is does not stand on the roof, he waits at the door and points you in.
The Central Balcony
The middle opening of the facade is the Loggia of the Blessings. A newly elected pope is announced from it with the formula Habemus Papam, and appears there to give his first blessing. The solemn blessing Urbi et Orbi, to the city and to the world, is given from the same balcony at Christmas and Easter. The three arched windows to each side belong to rooms of the basilica's upper level, and the clocks at either end of the facade were added in the eighteenth century, one keeping Roman time and the other, historically, French time.
6. The Five Doors and the Holy Door
Five doors lead from the atrium into the church. The central one is the oldest of the five, the bronze door cast by Antonio Averlino, called Filarete, between 1439 and 1445 for the old basilica and moved into the new one, with panels showing Christ, the Virgin, and the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul. The others are twentieth-century bronzes, including Giacomo Manzu's Door of Death on the far left, which carries a panel of the death of Pope John XXIII and is the door coffins leave by.
The door on the far right is the Holy Door, and it is the one most visitors ask about. Outside a Jubilee it is closed and sealed, with masonry built up behind it on the inside, so that what you see is a bronze door that does not open. Sixteen panels by the Sienese sculptor Vico Consorti, installed for the Holy Year of 1950, run through the fall and the forgiveness of sin, from Adam and Eve out of the garden to the Church's absolution. The panels reward five minutes even when the door is shut, and shut is how a visitor will usually find it.
What a Jubilee Does
A Jubilee, or Holy Year, is a year of pardon and pilgrimage that the Church has kept since Boniface VIII proclaimed the first in 1300. Ordinary jubilees now fall every twenty-five years, and popes have also called extraordinary ones, as Pius XI did in 1933 and Francis did for the Year of Mercy in 2015 and 2016. The pope opens the Holy Door to begin the year and it is walled up again at the end of it. The older rite in which he struck the wall three times with a silver hammer has been replaced by one in which he pushes the door open. Pope Francis opened this door on 24 December 2024 for the Jubilee of 2025, and it was closed again at the end of that Holy Year. See the guide to the Jubilee Year and what it asks of you.
Passing through the Holy Door during a Jubilee is the act to which the Church attaches a plenary indulgence, granted under the ordinary conditions: sacramental confession, Holy Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope, and freedom from attachment to sin. An indulgence remits the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt is already forgiven, which is a narrower thing than most people assume and is explained in the guides to confession and how absolution works and to purgatory. The conditions are the ones the Church names and nothing else counts toward them. No purchase has any part in it, and the Church attaches nothing to the Pro package sold on this site, which buys audio devotionals, guided prayers and Bible studies and buys nothing else.
7. The Pieta
The first chapel on the right, a few steps inside the door, holds Michelangelo's Pieta. It was carved from a single block of Carrara marble in 1498 and 1499, commissioned by a French cardinal, Jean de Bilheres de Lagraulas, for his own funeral monument in the old basilica. Michelangelo was in his early twenties when he made it, and it is the only sculpture he ever signed. The signature runs along the sash across the Virgin's breast: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this. Vasari's account, repeated ever since, is that he cut it in at night after hearing visitors credit the work to another sculptor.
The composition solves a hard problem. A seated woman holding the body of a grown man tends to look either unstable or grotesque. Michelangelo built a wide pyramid of drapery beneath her so the body is carried without strain, made her larger than she strictly should be under all that cloth, and gave her a face far younger than a mother of a thirty-three-year-old. Asked about the youth, he is reported to have argued that chastity preserves the body from ageing. The theological effect of the choice is stronger than the explanation: the woman holding the dead Christ is the girl of the Annunciation, and the moment at Nazareth and the moment at the foot of the cross are being shown as one thing.
The glass in front of it was installed after 21 May 1972, Pentecost Sunday, when a man climbed the altar rail with a hammer and struck the statue more than a dozen times before he was pulled off, breaking the Virgin's left arm and damaging her nose, eyelid and veil. The restoration used fragments recovered from the floor and from visitors who had pocketed them, and the sculpture went back on display the following year. The glass is a nuisance and a light trap, and it is the reason the work still exists to be photographed badly.
Take the time here. The chapel is the first thing inside the door and most people photograph it in eight seconds while walking past. Michelangelo's Mary shows Catholic grief in a single gesture: she opens her left hand and presents the body, holding it steadily and without display. For the woman herself, see the guide to Mary, the Mother of God.
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Get Pro for $49 One-time payment. Lifetime access. 30-day money-back guarantee.9. The Baldachin and the Confessio
At the crossing, under the dome, stands Bernini's baldachin, a bronze canopy on four twisting columns rising nearly twenty-nine metres over the papal altar. Bernini worked on it from 1623 to 1634 for Urban VIII, his first great commission in the basilica, begun when he was in his twenties. The twisted columns copy the spiral columns of the old basilica, which medieval Rome believed had come from the Temple in Jerusalem, so the form quotes the church that stood here before. The bees and sun-faces in the bronze are Barberini family emblems, which is what happens when a pope from a powerful family pays for a monument.
Bronze for the work was stripped from the portico of the Pantheon on Urban VIII's orders in 1625, which produced a Roman pasquinade quoted ever since: what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did. Historians have since argued about how much of the Pantheon bronze went into the baldachin and how much was cast into cannon for Castel Sant'Angelo, so the pasquinade is better evidence of Roman opinion than of metallurgy.
The Confessio
In front of the altar the floor opens into a sunken semicircular well with a double stair curving down into it. This is the confessio, designed by Maderno, and it is the point the whole building is arranged around. Oil lamps burn around its rim. At the bottom, behind a grille, is the niche of the pallia, where the woollen bands given to new metropolitan archbishops are kept overnight before they are conferred, resting against the tomb. The floor at that level is the floor of Constantine's basilica. Below it is the shrine, and below that the graves of the Roman cemetery.
The word confessio here names the confession of faith a martyr makes in dying, and by extension the tomb where that martyr lies. The sacrament of confession is a separate thing with a similar name. Every altar in the Latin Church built over relics is imitating this arrangement, and the arrangement is imitating the vision in Revelation of the souls of the slain lying under the heavenly altar (Revelation 6:9). When a Catholic kneels at the rail above the confessio, that is what the architecture is saying.
What the Excavations Established, and What They Did Not
Pius XII authorised excavation under the basilica in 1940 and the work ran to 1949. It uncovered a street of Roman mausolea and, beneath the altar, a second-century memorial against a red wall, with later walls built around it, including one covered in Christian graffiti. In a radio message at Christmas 1950 Pius XII announced that the tomb of the apostle had been found and said plainly that it was not possible to be certain that human remains recovered belonged to Peter. Later work by the epigrapher Margherita Guarducci concentrated on bones taken from a cavity in the graffiti wall, and on 26 June 1968 Paul VI stated that relics identified in the excavation were held, in a manner he considered convincing, to be those of the apostle.
The dates and the wording of the two papal statements above are those of the Christmas radio message of Pope Pius XII in 1950 and the general audience address of Pope Paul VI of 26 June 1968, both published by the Holy See. The excavation reports were published by the Vatican from 1951 onwards.
The careful summary is the one to carry with you. That Christians of the second century venerated this exact spot as Peter's grave is very strongly attested by the monument, the graffiti and Gaius. Which bones from a disturbed necropolis belong to that grave is a separate question, argued over by archaeologists from the day the reports appeared, and no papal statement settles a technical dispute of that kind. Popular retellings tend to blur the two. The Church's own claim is the modest one, and the modest one is impressive enough.
10. The Dome
Michelangelo took charge of the building in 1546, at seventy-one, refused a salary, and worked on it until his death in 1564. He left the drum built and a large wooden model of the dome. Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana closed the dome between 1588 and 1590, raising the profile steeper than the model, which made it structurally safer and gave Rome the silhouette it has had ever since. The interior height to the top of the lantern is about a hundred and thirty-six metres, and the internal diameter is a little over forty-one metres, slightly narrower than the Pantheon's, which Michelangelo had measured and did not try to beat.
Around the inside of the drum, in gold letters on a blue ground, runs the Latin of Matthew 16:18-19: you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The letters are close to two metres high and look modest from the floor, and that gap between how they look and how big they are is the scale of the building in one detail. Above them, in bands rising to the lantern, are mosaics of Christ, the Virgin, the apostles, angels and the evangelists, and at the summit, in the eye of the lantern, God the Father.
Going Up
The climb to the cupola is the one physical exercise the basilica asks of you. A lift runs as far as the roof terrace when it is in service, putting you among the backs of the facade statues with the drum in front of you. The rest is stairs. The upper stage runs inside the shell of the dome itself, so the wall leans in over your shoulder and the passage narrows and tilts, with a rope down the centre to hold, which makes it a poor climb for anyone with a serious fear of enclosed spaces. The balcony inside the drum, reached on the way, gives the view straight down onto the baldachin and the confessio, and that is when the arrangement of the whole church makes sense.
The heights and diameters given in this section are the official measurements published by the Fabbrica di San Pietro. Figures quoted elsewhere differ by a metre or two depending on whether they are measured to the vault, the lantern or the cross.
11. The Chair of St Peter
At the far end of the church, in the apse behind the altar, is Bernini's Cathedra Petri, finished between 1657 and 1666 for Alexander VII. A great gilded bronze throne appears to float in the air, held up by four colossal bronze figures of doctors of the Church, Ambrose and Augustine from the West in mitres, Athanasius and John Chrysostom from the East bare-headed. Above it, gilded stucco clouds and angels boil out around a window of yellow alabaster with a dove of the Holy Spirit at the centre, so that on a clear afternoon the light comes through the dove and floods the apse. The whole assembly is frankly theatrical, and it is doing a serious job: showing the teaching office of Peter carried by the tradition of the Fathers and lit from above.
The bronze throne is a reliquary. Inside it is an ancient wooden chair, decorated with ivory plaques, which Rome venerated for centuries as the chair of the apostle himself. Paul VI ordered a scientific examination, carried out at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, and its conclusion was that the surviving chair is early medieval rather than apostolic, of a kind consistent with the throne that Charles the Bald is recorded as having given to the pope in the ninth century. The Church published the finding rather than suppressing it, which is worth noticing.
The examination of the wooden chair was ordered by Pope Paul VI and its results were published in the early 1970s by the commission of scholars he appointed. The Holy See has published the finding since.
The feast of the Chair of St Peter falls on 22 February. What the feast keeps is the office rather than the furniture: a cathedra is the chair a bishop teaches from, and the Latin phrase for a solemn definition, ex cathedra, means spoken from that chair. A chair that turns out to be Carolingian does not weaken the doctrine, because the doctrine was never about the wood. The guide to the papacy works through what is and is not claimed for that teaching office, and the guide to Scripture and Tradition explains the framework it sits in.
12. The Bronze St Peter and Its Worn Foot
Against the last pier on the right of the nave, before the crossing, sits a life-sized bronze statue of St Peter enthroned, holding the keys in his left hand with his right raised in blessing. Its right foot projects slightly from the base, and the toes have been rubbed away to a smooth stub by the hands and lips of pilgrims. The wear is the point of the statue now. You will find a queue in front of it at almost any hour, and the people in the queue are not admiring the casting.
The attribution is uncertain and honest guides say so. The statue is usually given to Arnolfo di Cambio in the late thirteenth century. Some scholars have argued for a fifth-century date instead, making it a survival from the age of the old basilica. Nothing in the metal settles it, and the debate has run for a very long time without resolution.
Why Catholics Touch It
Touching or kissing the foot is an act of veneration directed at the apostle, in the same category as kissing a crucifix or a relic. Catholic teaching draws a firm line between the worship owed to God alone and the honour given to saints, and the honour given to an image passes to the person it represents rather than stopping at the object. The Second Council of Nicaea settled the principle in 787 against the iconoclasts, and the guide to the saints and why Catholics honour them works through it. Nothing is claimed for the bronze itself, and no benefit attaches to the gesture beyond the prayer that goes with it.
On 29 June, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the statue is vested: a red and gold cope over the shoulders, a ring on the finger, and a papal tiara on the head. Pilgrims who arrive that day and find the bronze dressed as a pope sometimes think they have wandered into something eccentric. The custom is a long-standing one, and 29 June is a public holiday in Rome.
13. The Grottoes and the Papal Tombs
Stairs down from the crossing piers lead into the Vatican Grottoes, the low vaulted space between the floor of the present basilica and the floor of Constantine's. Walking it is walking the old church at its own level. Fragments of Old St Peter's are set into the walls: columns, sarcophagi, inscriptions, pieces of medieval monuments broken up when the new church went in. The far end runs up against the back of the shrine, so the grottoes finish at the point everything else is aimed at.
Popes have been buried here since the beginning, and the grottoes hold tombs from many centuries, along with a small number of others, including Queen Christina of Sweden, who abdicated her throne after becoming Catholic in 1654. The tombs are plain, mostly modern, and set in rows along a corridor with a chapel or two off it. Visitors expecting the marble theatre of the church above find the crypt sober and much quieter, and many people prefer it.
The Tombs Move
One thing catches people out: the tombs are not fixed. When a pope is beatified or canonised his body is generally brought up from the grottoes into the church above, and the vacant grotto tomb is used again. John XXIII was moved upstairs in 2001, to an altar in the north aisle, and John Paul II was buried in the tomb John XXIII had left. When John Paul II was beatified in 2011 he was in turn brought up to the Chapel of St Sebastian in the nave, where he lies now, and Benedict XVI was buried in the grotto niche that John Paul II had vacated when he died in December 2022. The chain of three occupants in one hole in the floor is a compact lesson in how the Church treats its dead. For the men themselves, see the guides to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
Not every pope is buried at St Peter's. Several of the Roman basilicas hold papal tombs, and Pope Francis, who died on 21 April 2025, asked in his will to be buried at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore across the city, near the icon of the Virgin he prayed before, rather than in the Vatican. His grave there is deliberately plain.
14. How to See It Without Missing It
St Peter's punishes the visitor who treats it as a museum. The crowd moves in one direction, the marble is relentless, and after forty minutes most people cannot remember what they have looked at. A short plan fixes this.
Come With a Route
Enter and go straight to the Pieta before the crowd builds behind you, and stay in front of it for five minutes. Then walk the whole length of the nave without stopping, reading the church names in the floor as you pass them, so that the scale arrives through your feet. At the crossing, go to the rail of the confessio and kneel there. That is the reason the building exists and it takes two minutes to pray at. Then the Cathedra in the apse, then the bronze Peter on the way back, then down to the grottoes, then up the dome if your legs and lungs are willing. That order takes about two hours and leaves you with a church rather than a blur.
Practical Things That Do Not Change
Shoulders and knees are covered inside, for everyone, and people are turned away at the door for shorts and vests every day of the summer. Security screening is at the entrance to the square, so the queue stretching around the colonnade is usually the scanner rather than the church. The Sistine Chapel is a separate visit under separate management through the Vatican Museums. Mass is celebrated at the side altars, and the side chapels are reserved for people praying rather than for people photographing. Confessions are heard in a dedicated area of the left transept, and the confessionals are marked with the language each priest speaks. Times, prices and access arrangements change, so take those from the basilica's own information office on the day rather than from any page written in advance, including this one.
If You Are Not Going to Rome
Most people who read this page will never stand under that dome, and the prayer the building was made for is not restricted to people with a passport and a plane fare. A pilgrimage is a journey made for God, and the Church has always recognised forms of it that do not involve travel. The guides to what a pilgrimage actually is and to making a virtual pilgrimage from home set out how that is done honestly, without pretending a screen is a journey.
Peter's story, from the boat to the Vatican hill
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15. Frequently Asked Questions
What is St Peter's Basilica?
St Peter's Basilica is the great papal church of Vatican City, built over the place on the Vatican hill where Christians of the second century already honoured the grave of the apostle Peter. The present building replaced the basilica Constantine raised in the fourth century, was begun under Pope Julius II in 1506, took the work of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and was consecrated by Pope Urban VIII on 18 November 1626. It is the church where popes are buried, where the pope celebrates the great liturgies of the year, and where pilgrims come to pray at the confessio above the apostle's tomb.
Is St Peter really buried under St Peter's Basilica?
Christians in Rome were honouring a grave on the Vatican hill as Peter's by about the year 160, which is the date usually given to the small monument found under the basilica and matched to the shrine the presbyter Gaius described in a passage Eusebius quotes in his Ecclesiastical History. Excavations carried out under the basilica between 1940 and 1949 uncovered a Roman cemetery and that monument directly beneath the high altar. Pope Paul VI stated in 1968 that relics identified in the excavation are held to be those of the apostle, and archaeologists continue to disagree about which bones belong to which grave, so the honest summary is that the site of the memorial is very well attested and the identification of particular bones is not settled.
What is the Holy Door at St Peter's Basilica?
The Holy Door is the last of the five doors in the entrance wall of St Peter's, on the far right as you face the church, and outside a Jubilee it is sealed shut with masonry behind it. The pope opens it to begin a Holy Year and it is walled up again when the year ends, so for most of any quarter century a visitor sees a closed bronze door with sixteen panels on sin and forgiveness, cast by Vico Consorti and installed for the Holy Year of 1950. Passing through it during a Jubilee is the act to which the Church attaches a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions of sacramental confession, Holy Communion, prayer for the pope's intentions and detachment from sin.
Where is Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's Basilica?
Michelangelo's Pieta stands in the first chapel on the right as you enter St Peter's Basilica, a few steps inside the door, behind a wall of protective glass. Michelangelo carved it from a single block of Carrara marble in 1498 and 1499, in his early twenties, for a French cardinal's funeral monument, and it is the only work he ever signed, on the sash that crosses the Virgin's breast. The glass was installed after a man attacked the statue with a hammer on 21 May 1972, damaging the Virgin's arm, nose and eyelid, after which the sculpture was restored and returned to view.
Why is the foot of the bronze statue of St Peter worn away?
The seated bronze statue of St Peter against the last pier on the right of the nave has had its right foot rubbed smooth by centuries of pilgrims touching and kissing it, so that the toes have almost disappeared into the metal. The gesture is an act of veneration offered to the apostle rather than to the bronze, in the same way a Catholic kisses a crucifix. The statue is usually attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio in the thirteenth century, though some scholars have argued for a much earlier date, and on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June it is dressed in a cope and a tiara.
Is St Peter's Basilica the cathedral of Rome?
The cathedral of Rome is the Archbasilica of St John Lateran, which holds the pope's episcopal chair as Bishop of Rome and carries the ancient title of mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world. St Peter's Basilica has no cathedra of that kind and is not a cathedral at all. Its standing comes from the apostle's grave beneath its altar and from its use as the church of the papal liturgy, which is why conclaves, canonisations and the great feasts of the Roman calendar happen there rather than at the Lateran.