Passetto di Borgo: The Popes' Escape Corridor
Why is it significant?
Walk beside the long wall of brick and stone, topped with battlements, that runs straight as a ruler from the castle to the Vatican palaces, with arches where the streets of the Borgo pass beneath it.
Key Facts
| Place | Passetto di Borgo: The Popes' Escape Corridor |
|---|---|
| Address | Via dei Corridori, 00193 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90350, 12.46280 |
| Part of Walk | Pilgrims, Popes and Swiss Guards: Rome's Vatican and the Medieval Borgo |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk beside the long wall of brick and stone, topped with battlements, that runs straight as a ruler from the castle to the Vatican palaces, with arches where the streets of the Borgo pass beneath it. Up on top, behind those crenellations, is a covered passage roughly eight hundred metres long: the Passetto, the little passage.
The wall is older than the passage. In 846 Arab raiders sailed up the Tiber and plundered St Peter's, which then stood outside the city's defences. Horrified, Pope Leo the Fourth enclosed the Vatican hill and the Borgo with new walls, finished around 852, which is why this district is still called the Leonine City. Then, around 1277, Pope Nicholas the Third had a corridor built along the top, so that a pope could cross from his palace to the fortress without ever setting foot in the street.
The corridor earned its fame on 6 May 1527. The army of the emperor Charles the Fifth, unpaid and mutinous, Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries among them, stormed the Borgo. While the Swiss Guard made a last stand near St Peter's, Pope Clement the Seventh ran along this passage to the castle. The story goes that the historian Paolo Giovio threw his own dark cloak over the pope's white robes, so that he would not make an easy target for the gunmen below.
Clement stayed shut up in the castle for months while Rome was sacked, looted and burned around him. He finally came to terms, paid a crushing ransom, and in December slipped out of the city in disguise. More than thirty years earlier, in 1494, Alexander the Sixth, the Borgia pope, had taken refuge in the same fortress when the French king Charles the Eighth marched into Rome. The Passetto was the papacy's lifeboat.
Today, on certain summer evenings, visitors can walk along the top where the popes once ran for their lives. Now slip under one of the arches into the narrow, cobbled street that runs alongside the wall, Borgo Pio. This is where the pilgrims lived, ate and slept.