Let’s start with the most widespread misunderstanding in Rome: entering St Peter’s Basilica is free.
Always, for everyone, with no ticket and no booking. The enormous queue you see crossing St Peter’s Square is not the ticket-office queue, because there is no ticket office: it is the queue for the metal detector. Everyone going in passes a security check, and with thirty thousand visitors a day that check becomes a snake winding around the colonnade.
This changes everything about planning. You do not need to buy anything to get in: you need to arrive early, because the time you spend here is spent queuing, not at a till.
Then there are the things you do pay for, and there are three of them: the climb to the dome, the necropolis beneath the basilica, and some guided tours. I will explain them all, but first let me tell you what to look at, because St Peter’s is so large that without a list you end up photographing empty space.
If you are coming from the Vatican Museums, bear in mind that these are two different visits with two different entrances: the museums have a ticket, the basilica does not.
The measurements on the floor
As soon as you go in, before you look up, look down. Set into the marble of the central nave there are golden stars.
They are not decoration. Each one marks the total length of another great church in the world, measured from the apse of St Peter’s. It is a ruler made of stone, and it is the proudest and funniest thing in the whole building: you walk towards the altar and pass, one after another, all the churches St Peter’s has beaten.
The figures are these:
- St Peter’s in the Vatican: 186.36 metres, the length of the whole nave, also marked at the entrance in Roman palms, with the inscription 837 P.R.;
- St Paul’s, London: 158.10 metres;
- Florence Cathedral: 149.28 metres;
- Milan Cathedral: 134.94 metres.
The game is clear: when you stand on the star for St Paul’s in London and turn back towards the door, you are seeing how much church is left over at St Peter’s after London’s cathedral has already ended. That is twenty-eight metres of difference, and you can see it with your own eyes.
The rest of the measurements have the same effect: the basilica is 218 metres long overall, 136.5 metres high to the top of the dome, with an area of some 23,000 square metres and a capacity estimated at around 60,000 people. The central nave is 45 metres high: a fifteen-storey building would fit inside the nave of St Peter’s.
A useful warning: that scale makes St Peter’s the place where you most easily misjudge size. The gilded letters of the frieze along the entablature look about as tall as your arm: they are nearly two metres high. The putti holding the holy water stoups look like children: they are the size of a grown man. Always find a person standing next to whatever you are looking at, or everything will seem normal.
The Pietà, and the signature
First chapel on the right, behind glass. It is Michelangelo’s Pietà, carved between 1497 and 1499, when the artist was little more than twenty.
Look at the band that crosses the Virgin’s breast and holds up her mantle. It reads:
MICHAEL·A[N]GELVS·BONAROTVS·FLORENT[INVS]·FACIEBAT
Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Florentine, was making this. It is the only work Michelangelo ever signed in his whole life, and the reason is an anecdote that explains the man better than a biography: he overheard two visitors praising the sculpture and attributing it to the Lombard sculptor Cristoforo Solari. He came back at night and signed it.
And then there is the epilogue, which is why the glass is there. On 21 May 1972, Pentecost Sunday, a thirty-four-year-old man, the Hungarian-born, Australian-naturalised geologist László Tóth, went up to the sculpture with a hammer and struck it fifteen times. He broke the Virgin’s left arm, shattered the elbow, almost destroyed the nose and eyelids, and dislodged about fifty fragments. The restoration was completed on 21 December of the same year, using the pieces gathered up in the chapel. Since then the Pietà has stood behind bulletproof glass.
That is why you will not see it as Michelangelo intended: the distance has increased, there is a reflection, and the low viewpoint the artist calculated is no longer reachable. Knowing why makes the glass less irritating.
If you want the full picture of the artist, I have written about Michelangelo Buonarroti, and his Vatican story continues in the curiosities about the Sistine Chapel.
The baldachin, and where the bronze came from
In the middle of the basilica, above the papal altar and above Peter’s tomb, stands the largest thing in bronze the Baroque ever produced: the baldachin by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, built from July 1624 to 1633, inaugurated on 28 June 1633, 28.5 metres high and commissioned by Pope Urban VIII.
Twenty-eight and a half metres: the height of a nine-storey building, inside a church, and it does not look big because everything around it is bigger. The four twisted columns holding it up quote the spiral columns of the old Constantinian basilica, which tradition said came from the Temple of Solomon: Bernini takes an architectural relic and blows it up to giant scale.
And now the story of the bronze, which has to be told properly because almost everyone gets it wrong.
Popular history says: the bronze of the baldachin comes from the Pantheon, whose portico beams Urban VIII had stripped, and that is why Romans coined the lampoon quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini.
The documented reconstruction is different. The Pantheon’s bronze was indeed taken by Urban VIII, but it went mostly into eighty cannon for Castel Sant’Angelo, not into the baldachin. The American art historian Louise Rice has argued that the link between the Pantheon and the baldachin is a deliberately fabricated piece of false news: saying the bronze had become a sacred work sounded better than admitting it had become artillery.
So the lampoon is authentic, the stripping is authentic, and the connection to the baldachin is propaganda. Which, if anything, makes it an even better story.
The Cattedra Petri, and the only coloured window
Walk past the baldachin, all the way to the end of the apse, and look up. That machine of gilded bronze, clouds, angels and rays is the Cattedra Petri, the Chair of St Peter, also by Bernini, made between 1656 and 1665.
The bronze throne is not a throne: it is a reliquary. Inside it there is a medieval wooden chair, which tradition held to be the apostle’s own seat. Bernini neither shows it nor hides it: he encases it in a structure that makes it look lifted into the air by invisible forces.
Above it comes the coup de théâtre. An alabaster window with the dove of the Holy Spirit, with a wingspan of 162 centimetres, surrounded by a burst of gilded stucco. It is the only coloured window in the entire basilica: in a building with hundreds of white windows, there is exactly one that gives colour, and it sits precisely where the eye arrives at the end of the route.
A practical tip: the Cattedra works with afternoon light, when the sun comes round to that side. If you get there in the morning you will see it switched off.
Michelangelo’s dome, climb included
The dome is Michelangelo’s, who set the design taking his cue from Brunelleschi’s in Florence, but he never saw it finished: it was Giacomo Della Porta who completed it between 1588 and 1590, raising its profile to reduce the lateral thrust. From the floor to the cross is 136.5 metres.
You can climb it, and it is worth it. Here are the real numbers, which nobody tells you beforehand:
- the full climb is 551 steps;
- with the lift you skip the first 231, and 320 remain;
- those 320 are not ordinary steps. The staircase runs inside the thickness of the dome, so it narrows progressively and tilts: towards the end you walk bent over, with the wall pushing you to one side. It is not claustrophobic for everyone, but it is claustrophobic for many.
The Fabbrica di San Pietro explicitly advises against the climb for anyone with heart or respiratory problems, vertigo, claustrophobia or mobility difficulties, and for pregnant women. It is hard work for small children. Pets are not admitted.
What you get: the inner gallery, from which you look down into the basilica and watch the baldachin turn small, and then the outer gallery at the top, from which you see Bernini’s colonnade from above like a drawing, the Vatican Gardens, the Tiber, Castel Sant’Angelo and Rome all the way to the mountains. It is the view that explains the geography of the city in ten seconds.
Five architects, a hundred and twenty years
St Peter’s is the building where the Renaissance changed its mind four times, and you can see it.
The previous basilica was the Constantinian one, of the fourth century, built over Nero’s circus and a necropolis where tradition placed Peter’s grave: five naves, a wooden roof, and for twelve hundred years the most important church in the West.
Then, on 18 April 1506, Pope Julius II laid the first stone of the new one. And the changes of direction begin:
- Bramante (from 1506) designs a central plan on a Greek cross, and to do it he demolishes almost the whole presbyterial part of the ancient basilica. The choice was already fiercely contested at the time;
- Raphael (from 1514) shifts the design towards a longitudinal basilica with three naves;
- Sangallo (1520-1546) tries to hold both ideas together and builds an extremely costly wooden model;
- Michelangelo (from 1546) goes back to the central plan, simplifies the interior space and concentrates everything on the effect of the dome;
- Carlo Maderno (from 1603) lengthens the nave and turns the plan definitively into a Latin cross. He is the one who builds the façade, which reads PAVLVS V BVRGHESIVS ROMANVS PONT MAX AN MDCXII, Paul V Borghese, in the year 1612;
- Bernini (from 1629) adds the baldachin, the Cattedra and the square with its colonnade.
The basilica was consecrated by Pope Urban VIII on 18 November 1626, a hundred and twenty years after the first stone.
And here is the consequence you can see on the spot: Bramante’s basilica and Michelangelo’s do not exist. They were centrally planned buildings, in which the dome stood over the middle of the space and you saw it from inside the moment you walked in. By lengthening the nave by eighty metres, Maderno moved the entrance far from the dome, and from outside he hid it behind the façade. If you want to understand what Michelangelo had in mind, you have to look at St Peter’s from behind, from the Vatican Gardens or the Janiculum: from there the dome returns to the centre and the building takes on a different shape.
What you pay for and what you do not
Here is the real table, and it is the reason this article exists.
Free, always:
- entry to the basilica, with no ticket and no booking;
- access for worship, with dedicated routes and assistance for anyone coming to pray or celebrate;
- confessions: Monday to Saturday 7 am to 12.30 pm and 4 pm to 7 pm, Sunday 7 am to 1 pm and 4 pm to 7 pm.
Paid for:
- the climb to the dome. At the kiosk under the portico it generally costs 10 euros by the stairs and 15 euros with the lift; online, on the official site, prices rise to about 17 and 22 euros but include the digital audio guide for the basilica and a booked entry time. The official pages do not publish the price list, so check at the desk or during booking;
- the Vatican Necropolis, the excavations beneath the basilica with Peter’s tomb. 20 euros full and 14 euros reduced, licensed guide included;
- the guided tours of the basilica, bought at the Visit Desk in the reception area;
- the Vatican Grottoes, which for years were freely accessible and today fall among the ticketed visits: check before counting on it.
Free admission on visits for children under 6 and for visitors with certified disability above 74%; reductions for ages 7 to 17 and for student and pilgrim groups.
Practical information
Details verified on 30 July 2026 on the official site of the Fabbrica di San Pietro. Before you travel, check again on basilicasanpietro.va, which is the official site: prices and hours change, and necropolis bookings run out weeks in advance.
Opening hours. The basilica is open 7 am to 8 pm in the summer months (from 1 June), closing earlier in winter. The dome opens at 7.30 am and closes at 5 pm in the winter period (26 October to 28 March) and 7 am to 6 pm in summer (29 March to 25 October). Guided tours leave from the Visit Desk on weekdays from 9.30 am to 5.30 pm, last registration 5 pm; on Sundays and Vatican holidays from 1.30 pm to 3.30 pm, last registration 3 pm.
The dress code, which is the thing that wastes the most time. The official rule is precise: trousers to the knee, skirts to the knee, shoulders covered, for everyone. It is not advice and it is checked at the entrance: anyone turning up in a vest top or short shorts is sent back after queuing the whole way. In summer bring a light scarf or a shirt to put over the top, and the matter is settled in ten seconds.
The other rules. No phone calls, no smoking, no eating or drinking, no animals or bulky objects. There is no cloakroom, so travel light: a big rucksack is a problem at the checkpoint and stays a problem for the whole visit.
The necropolis. It must be booked in advance, through the form on the basilica’s website or by writing to the Ufficio Scavi. Groups are a maximum of 12 people, the visit lasts about an hour, and nobody under 10 is admitted. Monday to Friday the last tour is at 4.15 pm, Saturday at 12.30 pm; closed Sundays and Vatican holidays. Daily places number a few hundred: ask weeks ahead, not days.
When to go. The right moment is opening time, at seven. At that hour the security check is quick, the basilica is nearly empty and the light comes in low from the east. From ten onwards the queue crosses the square, and in summer it does so in full sun, with no shade. The other good window is late afternoon, with the advantage that the Cattedra is well lit.
A constraint to know about. On Wednesday general audience days and during papal celebrations the square and the access arrangements change completely. Check the liturgical calendar before choosing your day.
If you would rather have a guide and the climb already organised, you can book the guided tour of the basilica with the dome climb and check availability. To be clear: entry to the basilica is free, so what you are buying is not access, it is the guide and the dome ticket, plus not having to juggle the queue, the checks and the timings yourself.
What to see nearby
St Peter’s is the end of a route that usually begins elsewhere, and the natural link is the Vatican Museums with the Sistine Chapel: two separate visits, with separate tickets and entrances, but five minutes apart.
If instead you are interested in the hand that invented half of Baroque Rome, the baldachin and the Cattedra are only two stops: the others are in the article on Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and the rivalry that produced all of it is told in the curiosities about Bernini and Borromini.
One last thing to do, and it costs nothing. When you come out, do not cross the square diagonally. Find one of the two porphyry discs in the paving, between the obelisk and the fountains, stand on it and look at the colonnade. From that exact point the four rows of columns line up and you see only one: four concentric rings becoming a single circle. Bernini calculated those two spots, and they are the only part of the whole complex that works solely if you stand where he tells you to.
