The Vatican Walls and the Museums Gate
Why is it significant?
Walk beside the great sloping wall of brick and stone that towers above the pavement, blank and solid, broken only by bastions. Queues snake along its foot in every language on earth.
Key Facts
| Place | The Vatican Walls and the Museums Gate |
|---|---|
| Address | Viale Vaticano, 00120 Città del Vaticano |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90660, 12.45370 |
| Part of Walk | Pilgrims, Popes and Swiss Guards: Rome's Vatican and the Medieval Borgo |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk beside the great sloping wall of brick and stone that towers above the pavement, blank and solid, broken only by bastions. Queues snake along its foot in every language on earth. On the other side lie gardens, palaces and some of the most visited museums in the world, and this wall is all most visitors see of them for the first hour.
These walls are mostly sixteenth-century, raised and strengthened after the trauma of 1527 by Paul the Third and the popes who followed him, with military architects such as Antonio da Sangallo the Younger working on the defences. They were built to resist cannon fire, which is why they slope and why they are so thick. Today they mark an international border, and you will cross it without a single passport check.
The museums trace their origins to one winter's day. In January 1506 a statue was dug up in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill: Laocoön and his sons, strangled by sea serpents, a masterpiece praised by the ancient writer Pliny. Pope Julius the Second sent his architect Giuliano da Sangallo to look, and Sangallo took Michelangelo along. Within weeks the pope had bought it and set it up in his courtyard of statues in the Belvedere. That is why the Vatican Museums count 1506 as their year of birth.
When visitors finally leave, many of them walk down a famous double-spiral staircase built in 1932 by Giuseppe Momo, two ramps twisting around each other, one for going up and one for coming down, so the two streams of people never meet. It feels like a little allegory of this whole city: pilgrims coming in, travellers going out, all on the same road.
You began at a bridge built by a pagan emperor for his own tomb, and you end at walls built by popes to protect another tomb, the grave of a fisherman from Galilee. From Bernini's angels to the Swiss Guards' oath, everything in this corner of Rome grew around that one grave on a hillside. Join the queue if you like, or wander back into the Borgo for a well-earned coffee. Either way, the walk ends here.