Pilgrims, Popes and Swiss Guards: Rome's Vatican and the Medieval Borgo

From Bernini's angels and Hadrian's tomb along the popes' secret escape corridor, through the pilgrims' Borgo to St Peter's Square, the basilica, the Swiss Guard and the Vatican walls

Rome · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Ponte Sant'Angelo: Bernini's Windswept Angels

   Ponte Sant'Angelo, 00186 Roma RM, Italy

   Step onto the bridge and walk slowly between the angels. Ten of them line the parapets in white marble, their robes whipped by a wind that isn't blowing, each holding up an object from the Passion of Christ: the whip, the crown of thorns, the nails, the sponge, the cross. Ahead of you, the great round castle fills the sky.

   The bridge itself is ancient. The emperor Hadrian built it in 134 AD as the grand approach to his own mausoleum, the castle in front of you, and its central arches are still Roman. For the next fifteen centuries, nearly every pilgrim heading for St Peter's crossed the Tiber right here. It was the main road to the Vatican, and the bottleneck of all Christendom.

   Which led to tragedy. During the Jubilee of 1450, a vast crowd on the bridge panicked, and people were crushed or thrown into the river; well over a hundred died. The square at the city end of the bridge was also a place of public executions. In 1599 the young noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, condemned for the murder of her violent father, was beheaded there, and Romans have half-believed ever since that her ghost returns to the bridge on the night before the anniversary, carrying her head.

   The angels came in 1669, when Pope Clement the Ninth asked Gian Lorenzo Bernini, then about seventy, to turn the bridge into a Way of the Cross. Bernini designed all ten, and his workshop carved them. He sculpted two with his own hands, the angel with the crown of thorns and the angel with the inscription. The story goes that they were judged too beautiful to leave out in the rain, and today they stand inside the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte. What you see here are copies by his pupils.

   At the city end, Saint Peter with his keys and Saint Paul with his sword have stood guard since the 1530s, like two bouncers at the door of the Vatican. Let them wave you across, and walk to the foot of the castle's massive walls.

2. 2. Castel Sant'Angelo: Tomb, Fortress, Prison, Opera Stage

   Lungotevere Castello 50, 00193 Roma RM, Italy

   Tilt your head back at the huge brick drum, layered like a wedding cake: Roman tomb at the bottom, papal fortress in the middle, Renaissance apartments near the top, and at the very summit a bronze angel sheathing a sword. Few buildings on earth have changed jobs so many times.

   It began as the mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian, completed in 139 AD, a year after his death, and once clad in white marble with statues along its rim. The ashes of emperors were placed here for about eighty years, down to Caracalla. Then, as Rome walled itself in against the barbarians, the tomb was turned into a bastion. For the next thousand years, whoever held it held the bridge, and whoever held the bridge controlled the road to St Peter's.

   The name comes from the year 590. Plague was ravaging Rome, and the new pope, Gregory the Great, led a penitential procession through the streets. As it approached the bridge, the story goes, he saw the Archangel Michael above the mausoleum, sliding his sword back into its sheath, and the plague came to an end. The angel on top today is a bronze of 1753 by the Flemish sculptor Peter Anton von Verschaffelt.

   Inside were prisons, and some famous prisoners. The goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, locked up here in 1538, escaped by knotting bedsheets into a rope and lowering himself down the walls, breaking his leg on the way. He tells the whole adventure, at great length and with no modesty at all, in his autobiography. And in 1900 Giacomo Puccini set the last act of his opera Tosca on the castle's terrace, from which the heroine, betrayed and desperate, throws herself into the void.

   Walk round to the castle's western side and look for a long, high wall striking off towards the Vatican, with battlements and a covered walkway along its top. It was a pope's escape route. Follow it along the street at its foot, into the Borgo.

3. 3. Passetto di Borgo: The Popes' Escape Corridor

   Via dei Corridori, 00193 Roma RM, Italy

   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.

4. 4. Borgo Pio: The Pilgrims' Village

   Borgo Pio, 00193 Roma RM, Italy

   Stroll down the cobbled street, closed to traffic, between low ochre houses with shutters and flowerpots, laundry above and café tables below. Nuns hurry past, a priest stops for an espresso, a waiter calls out to a neighbour. It feels like a village, and that is exactly what it has always been: the village at the gate of St Peter's.

   The word Borgo itself is foreign. From the eighth century, communities from beyond the Alps settled around St Peter's to care for pilgrims from their homelands: Franks, Frisians, Lombards and Saxons from England. The Saxon quarter, the Schola Saxonum, was founded, tradition says, by King Ine of Wessex, and their Germanic word for a settlement, burh, is the usual explanation for the name Borgo. Romans called the Saxon corner simply in Saxia, and you'll meet that word again in a few minutes.

   For a medieval pilgrim, arriving here after months on the road was the end of the world and the gate of heaven at once. Inns, money-changers, relic-sellers, beggars and pickpockets crowded these alleys. Pilgrims bought little metal badges showing the apostles Peter and Paul to sew on their hats, proof that they had made it to Rome.

   This particular street takes its name from Pope Pius the Fourth, who in the 1560s enclosed the northern part of the Borgo within new walls and laid out new streets, a district nicknamed the Città Pia. But most of the old Borgo did not survive the twentieth century... and in a few minutes you'll see why. Streets like this one are a glimpse of what the whole quarter once looked like.

   Notice the little painted Madonnas on the corners, the madonnelle, often with a lamp: for centuries those lamps were almost the only light in the streets at night. Now cut south across the Borgo, across the wide avenue, to the river side of the district and a huge old hospital, with a strange revolving opening in its wall.

5. 5. Santo Spirito in Sassia: The Wheel of the Foundlings

   Borgo Santo Spirito 1, 00193 Roma RM, Italy

   Look for the small opening set into the old hospital wall close to the church, where a revolving drum once turned. It looks like a hatch for deliveries. For centuries it was the most heartbreaking door in Rome: a mother who could not keep her baby placed the child in the wheel, turned it, rang a bell, and walked away into the night, unseen.

   The story behind it is a legend about Pope Innocent the Third. Around 1198, it says, fishermen told the pope that their nets were bringing up the bodies of newborn babies thrown into the Tiber. Shaken, he founded a hospital here, on the site of the old Saxon hostel, to take in the sick, the poor and abandoned children. The foundlings, it is said, were marked with a double cross, the emblem of the Holy Spirit, and raised by the institution.

   Whatever the truth of the legend, the hospital is very real, and among the oldest in Europe. Pope Sixtus the Fourth rebuilt it in the 1470s around an enormous ward, the Corsia Sistina, well over a hundred metres long, its walls painted with scenes of the hospital's foundation. And it is still a working hospital today, just behind these walls.

   The church took its present form in the 1540s, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, the architect of Palazzo Farnese, with its facade completed later in the century. Since 1994 it has been a sanctuary of the Divine Mercy, much visited by Polish pilgrims. But the words in Sassia keep the oldest memory of all: this was Saxon ground, the corner of Rome where Anglo-Saxon kings like Ine of Wessex are said to have come to end their days as pilgrims.

   A hospital for the poorest, an English hostel, a hatch for unwanted babies... the Borgo was always about people arriving from far away with nothing. Now cross back to the great avenue that runs straight towards St Peter's, and stop at the church on its far side with a tall stone front and, oddly, no dome.

6. 6. Santa Maria in Traspontina: The Church Without a Dome

   Via della Conciliazione 14, 00193 Roma RM, Italy

   Stand on the pavement of the broad avenue and face the church's sober travertine front, with its stacked pilasters and statues in niches... and notice what is missing. Most Roman churches of this size carry a dome. This one doesn't, and the reason is military.

   The old church of Santa Maria in Traspontina, beyond the bridge, stood closer to Castel Sant'Angelo. In the 1560s it was demolished because it got in the way of the fortress's defences, and the new church was begun here, further off, in 1566. The story goes that it was deliberately left without a dome so as not to block the castle's line of fire across the Borgo. Even churches had to bow to the artillery.

   The ground around you hides another lost monument. Somewhere near here stood the Meta Romuli, a tall Roman pyramid tomb, a twin of the pyramid that still stands by the Porta San Paolo. Medieval pilgrims believed it was the tomb of Romulus himself. Its marble facing was stripped to pave the steps of the old St Peter's, and in 1499 Pope Alexander the Sixth cleared away what remained to open a straight new street to the Vatican for his Jubilee.

   Inside, the Carmelite friars who run the church guard an unusual pair of relics: two columns said to be those to which the apostles Peter and Paul were tied and scourged before their martyrdom. Tradition, not documentation... but for medieval pilgrims, this was one of the stations on the road to St Peter's, and plenty of them knelt here before they ever saw the basilica.

   Now look up and down the avenue. Everything around you, the straight lines, the matching palaces, the rows of stone lamp posts shaped like little obelisks, is less than a century old. Walk on towards the dome and stop a little further along, where the avenue opens wide and the basilica fills the end of the view.

7. 7. Via della Conciliazione: The Avenue That Erased a Neighbourhood

   Via della Conciliazione, 00193 Roma RM, Italy

   Turn to face St Peter's and take it in: the long, straight avenue running towards the basilica, the dome swelling at the end, rows of stone lamp posts like little obelisks marching beside you. It is one of the most famous views in the Christian world. And for almost all of history, it did not exist.

   Until the 1930s, the space around you was filled by the Spina di Borgo, a long block of medieval and Renaissance houses, workshops and palaces squeezed between two narrow parallel streets, Borgo Vecchio and Borgo Nuovo. Pilgrims threaded their way through those dim lanes and then, suddenly, burst out into Bernini's square, with the facade and the dome exploding in front of them. Architects have always said the effect was a theatrical surprise.

   On 11 February 1929, Mussolini's government and the Holy See signed the Lateran Pacts, ending almost sixty years of hostility since the popes had lost Rome to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. To celebrate this Conciliation, the regime decided on a monumental avenue. In 1936 Mussolini himself struck a symbolic first blow with a pickaxe, and the demolitions began. Families who had lived here for generations were moved out to new suburbs. The architects Marcello Piacentini and Attilio Spaccarelli designed the new street, and it was completed for the Holy Year of 1950.

   Not everything was lost. A few palaces were taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt in new positions along the avenue, like stage sets shifted around; others, such as Palazzo Torlonia, survived where they stood. Architects still argue about the result. Many say that Bernini's square was meant to be discovered, not seen from half a kilometre away, and that the avenue flattened the basilica into a postcard.

   Decide for yourself. Walk on to the end of the avenue, step over the white stone line set into the ground at the edge of the square, and you will be standing in another country.

8. 8. St Peter's Square: The Obelisk and the Water on the Ropes

   Piazza San Pietro, 00120 Città del Vaticano

   Walk to the centre of the square and stand at the foot of the obelisk, a plain shaft of red granite without a single hieroglyph, rising about forty metres to the cross on its tip, base included. Around you, Bernini's colonnade opens its arms, two great curves of columns four deep, like a church embracing the world.

   This obelisk came from Egypt under the emperor Caligula, who set it up in his circus on the Vatican hill, just south of where you stand. Christian tradition holds that Peter was martyred in that circus, within sight of this very stone. It is the only obelisk in Rome that never fell: while all the others toppled and vanished under the rubble, this one stood for fifteen centuries beside the old basilica.

   In 1586 Pope Sixtus the Fifth ordered it moved to the centre of the new square. His engineer, Domenico Fontana, mobilised some nine hundred men, about a hundred and forty horses and dozens of winches. Legend says the crowd was ordered to keep absolute silence, on pain of death, so the workers could hear the signals. At the critical moment the ropes began to stretch and smoke... and a sailor named Bresca shouted: Acqua alle funi! Water on the ropes! They were soaked, they held, and instead of punishment his family won the privilege of supplying the palms for Palm Sunday.

   Now find one of the two round stone discs set into the paving between the obelisk and each fountain. Stand on it and look at the nearest colonnade. The four rows of columns line up so precisely behind each other that they melt into a single row. Bernini built the colonnade between 1656 and 1667 and crowned it with a hundred and forty statues of saints, who watch over the crowds below.

   At Easter and Christmas this square fills with tens of thousands of people waiting for a few words from a balcony. Now walk straight ahead, up the gentle slope, towards the facade of one of the largest churches on earth.

9. 9. St Peter's Basilica: The Dome, the Pietà and the Tomb

   Piazza San Pietro, 00120 Città del Vaticano

   Stand at the foot of the steps and let the facade overwhelm you: more than a hundred metres wide, giant columns, the name of Pope Paul the Fifth Borghese carved across the top, and statues of Christ, John the Baptist and the apostles lined up along the roof. Behind it, only half visible from this close, rises Michelangelo's dome.

   The old basilica built by Constantine in the fourth century stood here for more than eleven hundred years, until in 1506 Pope Julius the Second laid the first stone of a new one. It took a hundred and twenty years, some twenty popes and a parade of geniuses: Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Maderno, Bernini. It was consecrated in 1626. And the money? The sale of indulgences to pay for it helped provoke Martin Luther's protest in 1517. The most magnificent church in Christendom helped split Christendom in two.

   Michelangelo took charge of the building in 1547, past seventy, and refused any salary, working, he said, for the love of God. He did not live to see the dome closed; Giacomo della Porta completed it in 1590. From the pavement to the top of the cross it rises about 136 metres. Inside, in the first chapel on the right, is the Pietà he carved in his early twenties. It is the only work he ever signed: Vasari tells us he overheard visitors crediting it to another sculptor, and carved his name across the Virgin's sash.

   In 1972 a man attacked the Pietà with a hammer, breaking the Virgin's arm and nose; since its restoration it has stood behind glass. And beneath the high altar, under Bernini's bronze canopy, lies the reason for all of this. Excavations in the 1940s uncovered a Roman cemetery beneath the basilica and a modest shrine that the Church identifies as the tomb of Saint Peter.

   Whatever you believe, this is a building raised over a grave, and every stone of it leans towards that one spot. Come back down the steps and walk to the right, along the northern arm of the colonnade, to a gate guarded by soldiers who have kept watch here for five hundred years.

10. 10. Porta Sant'Anna and the Swiss Guard

    Via di Porta Angelica, 00120 Città del Vaticano

    Watch the gate for a minute: delivery vans, cars with Vatican number plates, priests on bicycles, office workers with passes on lanyards, and at the entrance young men of the Swiss Guard checking who goes in. This is Porta Sant'Anna, the working entrance to the smallest state in the world.

    Vatican City covers less than half a square kilometre and has only a few hundred citizens. It was born on 11 February 1929 with the Lateran Pacts, and behind these walls it has its own post office, its own pharmacy, its own railway station, and its own army, one of the oldest military units in continuous service anywhere. Just inside the gate stands the little church of Sant'Anna dei Palafrenieri, the parish church of the Vatican, which gives the gate its name.

    The Pontifical Swiss Guard was founded in 1506, when Pope Julius the Second hired Swiss soldiers, then the most feared infantry in Europe. Their great test came on 6 May 1527, during the Sack of Rome. While Clement the Seventh fled along the Passetto, the guards made a stand near St Peter's. Of about one hundred and eighty-nine men, one hundred and forty-seven were killed, among them their commander; the survivors escorted the pope to safety. Ever since, new recruits swear their oath on 6 May.

    They must be Swiss, Catholic, unmarried when they join, and at least one metre seventy-four tall. And their famous striped uniform, whatever you may have been told, was not designed by Michelangelo. The version you see dates from the early twentieth century, the work of a commander named Jules Repond, who studied Renaissance paintings, Raphael's frescoes among them, for inspiration.

    The colours, blue, yellow and red, are usually read as a tribute to the della Rovere family of Julius the Second and to the Medici. Five centuries of loyalty in three stripes. Now follow the Vatican walls north to the busy square beyond and round the corner onto Viale Vaticano. They lead to the last gate of this walk.

11. 11. The Vatican Walls and the Museums Gate

    Viale Vaticano, 00120 Città del Vaticano

    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.