50 Fun Facts About St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter's Basilica stands inside which independent microstate?

Vatican City has been a sovereign state only since 1929; for almost sixty years before that, after Italy seized Rome, the popes refused to set foot outside its walls.

The original fourth-century St. Peter's Basilica was built by which Roman emperor?

Constantine the Great had the church raised directly over the small shrine that Rome's Christians venerated as Peter's grave, and it stood for nearly 1,200 years before the popes pulled it down.

Which corps, founded in 1506 as the first stone of the new St. Peter's was laid, still guards the pope?

The Swiss Guard swears in its recruits every 6 May, the date in 1527 when 147 of its men died holding off an imperial army so that Pope Clement VII could escape the Sack of Rome.

Which country built a basilica modelled on St. Peter's that Guinness World Records lists as the world's largest church?

Ivory Coast finished the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace at Yamoussoukro in 1989; it covers more ground than St. Peter's, yet it holds far fewer worshippers.

Which church, rather than St. Peter's, is Rome's cathedral and the Pope's official seat?

The Archbasilica of St. John Lateran holds the pope's throne as bishop of Rome, and the popes lived in the palace beside it for about a thousand years before they moved across the city to live beside St. Peter's.

According to Catholic tradition, St. Peter's tomb lies directly beneath what?

The high altar is the top of a stack: excavators in the 1940s found older altars and shrines nested beneath it, one inside another, down to a small second-century monument over a grave.

Before he became an apostle, what was the trade of St. Peter, the saint buried by tradition beneath the basilica?

Fisherman is still part of the job title: every pope, as Peter's successor, is given the Ring of the Fisherman, which by long tradition was destroyed with a hammer when he died.

The colossal statue of St. Veronica in one of the dome piers of St. Peter's shows her holding what?

Her veil, by legend, kept the image of Jesus's face after she wiped it on the road to Calvary, and the statue stands under the balcony where the relic itself was shown to pilgrims.

The Holy Door of St. Peter's is opened only during what?

Jubilee years are the only time it swings open: in between, the doorway is sealed from the inside with bricks and mortar, and the pope himself opens it to begin the Holy Year.

The two giant statues on the steps in front of the facade of St. Peter's depict which pair of saints?

Peter and Paul are Rome's two patron apostles: by tradition both were put to death there, Peter on a cross and Paul, who as a Roman citizen was spared crucifixion, by the sword.

Which pope was shot and wounded in St. Peter's Square in May 1981?

John Paul II was hit twice as he was driven through the crowd; he recovered, publicly forgave the gunman and later asked Italy's president to pardon him.

Which London church has a dome inspired by the dome of St. Peter's?

St Paul's Cathedral was due for repairs when the Great Fire of London destroyed it, so Christopher Wren designed a new one and crowned it with his Roman-inspired dome.

Tradition holds that St. Peter was martyred in Rome in 64 AD during the reign of which emperor?

Nero, by the Roman historian Tacitus's account, blamed the city's Christians for the Great Fire of 64, and had them executed in his circus on the hill where the basilica now stands.

According to Jerome, how did St. Peter ask to be crucified?

Head downwards, because he thought himself unworthy to die the way Jesus had, which is why an upside-down cross is a traditional Christian emblem of Peter.

Which Roman emperor shipped the Egyptian obelisk that now stands in St. Peter's Square from Alexandria to Rome?

Caligula set it up on his racetrack beside the site of the future basilica, and there it stood for some 1,500 years until a pope had it hauled 260 metres into the square in 1586.

Which pope announced the discovery of St. Peter's tomb in a radio broadcast on 23 December 1950?

Pius XII could announce only the tomb: he admitted that none of the bones found there could be proved to be Peter's, and it was Paul VI who declared them identified in 1968.

To gather stone for a rebuilt St. Peter's, Pope Nicholas V carted thousands of loads from which ancient monument?

The Colosseum was treated as a ready-made quarry: 2,522 cartloads of its stone were hauled away in Nicholas's reign, yet he died with almost none of his new church built.

Which pope decided in 1505 to tear down Old St. Peter's, partly to house his own enormous tomb?

Julius II got his new church but not his monument: the tomb was cut down again and again over forty years and ended up in a different Roman church, where he isn't even buried.

Selling indulgences to pay for the new St. Peter's provoked which German friar's protest in 1517?

Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-five Theses against the preacher Johann Tetzel, whose sales let a German archbishop clear his debts to Rome while paying for the basilica.

With which company did the Vatican build an AI 3D model of the basilica from drone photos in 2024?

Microsoft's software stitched more than 400,000 drone photographs into a digital twin of the church, and a year later the partners rebuilt it block by block as a Minecraft game for schools.

Whose Greek-cross design won the competition for the new St. Peter's, begun in 1506?

Donato Bramante's boldest idea was to carry the dome on four giant piers instead of a solid wall, and it is the one part of his plan that survived every later redesign.

The winning 1506 dome design for St. Peter's was inspired by which ancient Roman building?

The Pantheon's dome rests on a solid ring of wall, and the plan was to lift a copy of it high into the air; fifteen centuries on, the ancient original is still the wider of the two.

Which painter became architect of St. Peter's in 1514, only to die six years later aged 37?

Raphael redrew the church with a long nave in place of the Greek cross, but his successor went straight back to the old plan, and a nave was not built until almost a century later.

Which artist, then in his seventies, became Capomaestro of St. Peter's on 1 January 1547?

Michelangelo was 71 and took the post only because the pope insisted, writing that he did it 'only for the love of God and in honour of the Apostle'; he then ran the works until he died at 88.

The dome of St. Peter's is slightly narrower than which earlier Renaissance dome?

Florence Cathedral's dome, finished by Brunelleschi in 1436, also supplied the method: St. Peter's copies its double shell of brick, one dome nested inside another.

The promise to St. Peter written around the inside of the basilica's dome explains which crossed objects on the Vatican flag?

Keys of gold and silver cross on the flag because the dome's Latin text ends with Jesus promising Peter 'the keys of the kingdom of heaven'; the flag's yellow and white stand for the two metals.

Nearly every large altarpiece in St. Peter's looks like a painting but is really a copy made in which medium?

Mosaic copies took the paintings' places altar by altar, until only a single large altarpiece in the church was still a real painting.

When cracks appeared in the dome of St. Peter's in the mid-18th century, what was installed between its two shells?

Iron chains bind the dome the way hoops hold a barrel; the mathematician Giovanni Poleni, called in by the pope to examine the cracks, studied its shape by hanging a loaded chain.

The dome's inscription 'You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church' comes from which Gospel?

Matthew's Gospel turns on a pun at this point: Jesus renames Simon 'Peter', a name that means rock, in the same breath as he calls him the rock the church will be built on.

Who designed the facade of St. Peter's and the nave that extended its Greek cross?

Carlo Maderno's long nave pushed the front so far forward that it hides the great dome from anyone standing in the square, a complaint made about his work ever since.

The facade of St. Peter's is built of which stone?

Travertine was ancient Rome's everyday building stone, quarried a short haul away near Tivoli, so the church's front is made of the same pale rock as the ruins of the city around it.

The facade inscription of St. Peter's names a pope from which family, famous for its Roman villa and art gallery?

Borghese is spelled out in giant letters beside the word ROMANVS because Paul V liked to stress he was a Roman, though his family were recent arrivals from Siena.

Extra bays were added at each end of the facade of St. Peter's to carry a pair of what, never completed?

Bell towers were planned for both ends, but the only one ever raised cracked the facade beneath it in the 1640s and had to be pulled down, the worst failure of its celebrated designer's career.

Which Renaissance composer, music director at St. Peter's, was buried in the basilica in 1594 in a tomb since lost?

Palestrina went into the floor with the words 'Prince of Music' on his coffin, but later building work covered the grave and every attempt to find it since has failed.

The twisted columns of the bronze canopy in St. Peter's copy ancient ones said to come from which temple?

The Temple of Solomon was only the legend: the old basilica's spiral columns were really a Roman emperor's gift, but the bronze copies made such 'Solomonic' columns a fashion across Europe.

Which insects are picked out in gold on the bronze canopy over the altar of St. Peter's?

Bees were the family emblem of the Barberini pope Urban VIII, who commissioned the canopy, so they swarm over its columns and drapery as his personal badge in bronze and gold.

Which ruler was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in the old St. Peter's on Christmas Day in the year 800?

Charlemagne, by his biographer Einhard's account, said he would never have set foot in the church that day had he known what the pope was planning to do.

Who designed St. Peter's Square, built between 1656 and 1667, with its two great curving colonnades?

Gian Lorenzo Bernini meant the two curving colonnades to be read as arms: the motherly arms of the Church, reaching out to gather in everyone who walks into the square.

In which Dan Brown thriller does Robert Langdon race across Rome to stop stolen antimatter from destroying St. Peter's?

Angels & Demons hides the canister at St. Peter's tomb, deep under the basilica; for the 2009 film the crew built a St. Peter's Square of their own in California.

Who ordered the building of the Via della Conciliazione, the avenue from the Tiber to St. Peter's Square?

Mussolini had the avenue driven through an old quarter to mark his 1929 pact with the papacy; until then visitors came upon the square suddenly, out of a tangle of narrow streets.

Which Latin phrase is announced from the central balcony of St. Peter's when a new pope has been elected?

Habemus Papam, 'we have a pope', is read out by the senior cardinal deacon, and only then does the new pope step onto the balcony to give his first blessing to the city and the world.

Pope Francis, who died in 2025, chose to be buried in which Roman basilica instead of St. Peter's?

Santa Maria Maggiore keeps an ancient icon of Mary to which he was deeply devoted, and his will asked for a grave in the aisle beside its chapel; no pope had been buried in that church since 1669.

Which monarch, who abdicated in 1654 to convert to Catholicism, is buried in St. Peter's?

Queen Christina of Sweden was the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the great Protestant general of the Thirty Years' War, so her conversion and move to Rome were a triumph the popes were glad to honour.

Who was interred in St. Peter's on 5 January 2023?

Pope Benedict XVI had resigned in 2013, the first pope to step down in almost 600 years, so his funeral was led by his own successor, a sight without precedent in modern times.

The 'Navicella' in the portico of St. Peter's, a ship symbolising the Church, follows a design by which artist?

Giotto made the original in the early 1300s for the old basilica, but it was broken up when that was pulled down; what hangs there now is in effect a new work built around a few of his fragments.

Why is one foot of the bronze statue of St. Peter Enthroned largely worn away?

Centuries of pilgrims kissing it and touching it have rubbed the toes smooth, and every 29 June, the saint's feast day, the statue is dressed up in a pope's robes, ring and tiara.

The font of St. Peter's reuses a sarcophagus lid thought to come from which emperor's tomb, now Castel Sant'Angelo?

Hadrian's purple porphyry lid had a second career before its third: it first covered the tomb of the German emperor Otto II in the old basilica, and only later was it recut as the font.

The Pietà in St. Peter's is the only one of its sculptor's works to carry what?

His signature runs across the sash on Mary's chest: by Vasari's telling, he cut it there after overhearing visitors give the credit for the statue to another sculptor.

Since a hammer attack in 1972, the Pietà in St. Peter's has been displayed behind what?

Bulletproof glass went up after a man shouting that he was Jesus Christ struck the statue fifteen times, breaking off Mary's arm at the elbow and chipping her nose and eyelid.

Canova's monument in St. Peter's honours the last princes of which exiled royal house, including 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'?

Stuart claimants to the British throne lived out their exile in Rome as guests of the popes, and when the last died, the subscribers to their tomb included King George IV, whose family had replaced them.