What to see in Vatican City

Basilica di San Pietro

The greatest church in Christendom rises over what tradition holds to be the tomb of the Apostle Peter, martyred in Nero's nearby circus around 64 AD and buried on this Vatican hillside. A first great basilica was raised here by the emperor Constantine in the 4th century; by the Renaissance it was crumbling, and in 1506 Pope Julius II took the audacious decision to demolish it and start anew. The work consumed 120 years and the genius of a succession of architects — Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini — making the building a anthology of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque.

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Interno della Basilica

Stepping inside, the eye is overwhelmed by a controlled riot of marble, gilt bronze and light engineered to make 60,000 worshippers feel intimate with the high altar. Just inside the entrance, behind glass since a 1972 hammer attack, stands Michelangelo's "Pietà" — carved when he was only 24, the only work he ever signed, and a study in tenderness that no reproduction prepares you for.

Piazza San Pietro & Colonnato

Bernini laid out this vast oval between 1656 and 1667 as a piece of pure theatre: two great curving arms of quadruple colonnade — 284 travertine columns and 88 pilasters — reaching out, in the artist's own words, like the maternal arms of the Church embracing the faithful. Above them stand 140 statues of saints, and at the centre rises a red granite Egyptian obelisk, brought to Rome by Caligula and moved here in a celebrated 1586 feat of engineering using 900 men and 140 horses.

Via della Conciliazione

This broad avenue sweeping up to St Peter's is the youngest "monument" in the rione — and the most controversial. Until the 1930s the basilica was approached through the "Spina di Borgo", a dense tangle of medieval lanes that hid the great dome until you burst suddenly into Bernini's oval piazza, a deliberately staged surprise.

Musei Vaticani

Among the largest and richest museum complexes on earth, the Vatican Museums wind for some seven kilometres through palaces the popes filled with art over five centuries. The collection runs from Egyptian mummies and Etruscan gold to the supreme antiquities of the Cortile del Belvedere — the "Laocoön", unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506 with Michelangelo present, and the serene "Apollo Belvedere" — and on through the Raphael Rooms, frescoed by Raphael and his school for Julius II, whose "School of Athens" is a manifesto of the Renaissance.

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Cappella Sistina

The chapel where the cardinals lock themselves away to elect a pope is also the setting for the single most famous ceiling in art. Between 1508 and 1512 Michelangelo — a sculptor who protested he was no painter — covered the vault with the story of Genesis, from the Creation to the Flood, its central panel of God reaching out to give life to Adam among the most reproduced images ever made. He worked largely alone, craning backward on the scaffolding for four years, and the physical ordeal left him half-blind and aching.

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What to see Vatican City

Basilica di San Pietro

Interno della Basilica

Piazza San Pietro & Colonnato

Via della Conciliazione

Musei Vaticani

Cappella Sistina

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