The Motherchurch

St. Peter's Basilica (Basilica di San Pietro) in Rome, Italy

St. Peter's is one of the holiest basilicas in the Catholic faith, the pulpit for a parish priest we call the pope, one of the grandest creations of Rome's Renaissance and baroque eras, and the largest church in Europe (it was biggest in the world until an ugly barn of a place was recently completed in Africa).

You approach the church through the embracing arms of Bernini's oval colonnade, which encompasses

Piazza San Pietro

(stand at one of this oval piazza's foci to see the four-deep columns of the nearest colonnade suddenly line up to appear only one deep).

Free Tours!
There are free guided visits to St. Peter's run by volunteer professors and scholars from North American College in Rome. They're offered Mon-Fri at 2:15pm and 3pm, Sat at 10:15am and 2:15pm, and Sun at 2:30pm. They meet in front of the Vatican tourist info office, which is to the building along Piazza S. Pietro just left (south) of the main steps into the basilica.

The church itself takes at least an hour to see—not because they are too many specific sights; it just takes that long to walk down to one end of it and back.

St. Peter's sheer dimensions are staggering

—614 feet long, 145 feet high in the aisle soaring to 435 feet inside Michelangelo's dome (which is itself 139 feet acrss)—but everything is done to scale. That means those six-foot cherubs frolicking around the bathtub-sized holy water stoups do appear to be baby-sized until you look more closely.

The most magnificent basilica on Earth is a late Renaissance/early baroque masterpiece of architecture and decoration. St. Peter's was worked on by every great architect of Italy's 16th and 17th centuries: Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi, Antonio Sangallo the Younger, Michelangelo, Maderno, and Bernini.

Admire

Michelangelo's youthful masterpiece Pietà

in the first chapel on the right, sculpted at the age of 25. The beauty and unearthly grace of sweet-faced Mary and her dead son, Jesus, led some critics of the day to claim the 25-year-old Florentine sculptor could never have carved such a work himself. An indignant Michelangelo returned to the statue and did something he never did before or after: He signed it, chiseling his name unmistakably right across the Virgin's sash. The Pietà has been behind protective glass since the 1970s, when a hammer-wielding lunatic attacked it.

Follow the faithful to kiss (or at least rub) the heavily worn bronze nub of a foot on

Arnolfo di Cambio's 13th century St. Peter

halfway up the left aisle. Stand under the 96-foot-high baroque confectioner's-piece

baldacchino (altar canopy)

with its twisting columns cast by Bernini using the bronze revetments of the Pantheon.

TIP
St. Peter's has a strict dress code: no shorts, no skirts above the knee, and no bare shoulders. They will not let you in if you do not come dressed appropriately. In a pinch, guys and gals alike can buy a big, cheap scarf from a nearby souvenir stand and wrap it around legs as a long skirt or throw over shoulders as a shawl.

You must pay to take the elevator then climb (330 steps) to the

top of St. Peter's dome,

but it's worth it. Michelangelo designed this dome to loft 135m (450 ft.) above the ground at its top and stretch 42m (139 ft.) in diameter—in deference to the Pantheon, Michelangelo made his dome 1.5m (5 ft.) shorter across. Carlo Maderno's dome-top lantern affords you a fantastic and dizzying

city panorama.

Alongside the usual embroidered vestments, gilded chalices, and other bejeweled accouterments of the faith in the

Treasury

(entrance just before the left transept) is the enormous bronze slab tomb of Pope Sixtus IV, cast by early Renaissance master Antonio del Pollaiuolo in 1493 and edged with relief panels personifying the scholarly disciplines.

The Crypt-Keepers
In order to get into the sub-crypt Vatican Necropolis—only 200 visitors allowed per day, in groups of 12, over age 15 only—you have to book ahead at the Vatican Excavations Office (Ufficio Scavi— Fabbrica di San Pietro). You can either email them (scavi@fsp.va), fax them (+39-06-6987-3017) or apply directly through the Holy Office Gate off the colonnade to the left on Via Paolo VI (cool bit: you get to ask the pmpously costumed Swiss Guards for directions). You need to provide the number of visitors, your names, name/nature of group (if any), language, dates available (they determine when), and your contact info (email, fax, or postal address). Don't call them (though for info: +39-06-6988-5318, www.vatican.va), they'll contact you.

You also have to pay to get into the

crypt,

of "Vatican Grottoes, where many popes—and Queen Christina of Sweden—rest in peace. The sub-crypt, or

"Vatican Necropolis,"

with tombs dating from the origins of Christianity, is a pain to get into and only avaiable via a guided tour (see sidebar), but can be worth it.

St. Peter was probably martyred in the Circus of Nero, which lies under part of the current St. Peter's, but the actual site of his grave was argued over for centuries.

Then, in the 1940s, excavations uncovered here what many had thought was merely a medieval myth: the

Red Wall,

behind which St. Peter was fabled to be buried and upon which early Christian pilgrims scratched prayers, invocations, thanks, or simply their names in Latin.

Sure enough, behind this wall they found a small pocket of a tomb in which doctrine now holds the first pope was buried. The remains were moved and are now reverently housed under the main altar of the church up above.

Piazza S. Pietro
tel. +39-06-6988-3712, www.vaticano.va
Daily