Palace of Castel Gandolfo

Stand in the small square and listen. Water falls into the stone basin of the fountain. Café cups clink against saucers. Swallows cut across the pale façade above you. Somewhere behind those walls, the ground drops steeply away to a deep, round lake. You cannot see it from here, but you can feel the open air on the far side of the building. This is the Palace of Castel Gandolfo, for centuries the summer home of the popes.

First, a little geography. You are in the Alban Hills, southeast of Rome, on the rim of an ancient volcano. The crater filled with water long ago and became Lake Albano. That is why the town sits so high and so narrow, on a ridge between the lake and the plain. Rome's summers are heavy and hot. Up here, the air moves. For anyone with the choice, this ridge offered relief, and powerful people have chosen it for a very long time.

The oldest of them was a Roman emperor. Domitian, who ruled in the late first century, built a large villa on these slopes. Its remains still lie inside the papal estate, including a long vaulted gallery and traces of a theatre. So when the popes came, they were not building on empty land. They were moving into a landscape already shaped by imperial Rome, with old Roman stone underfoot.

The town's name comes from a medieval family, the Gandolfi, who held a castle here. Over time the property passed through other noble hands. In the late sixteenth century it came to the Holy See, the government of the Catholic Church. The building you see began to take its present form in the seventeenth century, under Pope Urban the Eighth, who worked with the architect Carlo Maderno. Maderno is better known in Rome for the façade of Saint Peter's Basilica.

Look at the front of the palace. It is calm and fairly plain, not a showpiece. The walls are soft yellow and cream, with simple windows in neat rows. Above the main doorway there is a balcony. In the summers, popes stood there to greet the crowd that filled this square. The building feels like a country house that grew slowly. That is close to the truth, because later popes added wings and rooms over many generations.

Now turn around and take in the square itself. Its fountain and the domed church of Saint Thomas of Villanova are linked to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the great Baroque sculptor and architect. Baroque is the dramatic style of seventeenth century Rome, full of curves and movement. Here Bernini worked on a smaller, quieter scale. The church dome rises over the rooftops, and the square works like a stage set, with the palace as its backdrop.

Here is a surprise most visitors miss. For decades the popes did not come here at all. In 1870 the new Kingdom of Italy took Rome, and the popes withdrew inside the Vatican as a form of protest. The palace stood largely unused. Only after the Lateran Treaty of 1929, the agreement between the Holy See and Italy, did the estate return to papal use. That treaty also gave the palace a special status. It belongs to the Holy See, not to the Italian state.

A second surprise is up on the roof. In the 1930s, the Vatican moved its astronomical observatory here, away from the lights and haze of Rome. Look for domes on the palace roofline. They once held telescopes used by Jesuit astronomers. As the night sky over Rome grew brighter, the main research telescope moved to Arizona in the United States. But the observatory's history is still tied to this building, and the domes remain part of the skyline.

The Second World War brought a very different chapter. As fighting moved through the Alban Hills, the papal estate opened its doors to people who had lost their homes. Thousands of refugees sheltered inside the palace and its grounds. Accounts from the time describe families living in corridors and halls. Many accounts say that babies were born in the papal rooms. For a few hard months, the summer home of the popes became a crowded village.

The palace has also seen endings. Pope Pius the Twelfth died here in 1958, and Pope Paul the Sixth died here in 1978. And in February 2013, Pope Benedict the Sixteenth flew here by helicopter on the evening his resignation took effect. He appeared at the window and spoke to the people in the square below. It was the first resignation of a pope in centuries, and he spent his first weeks as pope emeritus behind these walls.

Pope Francis rarely stayed here. Instead, in 2016, he opened the palace to the public as a museum. Visitors can now walk through rooms where popes once slept, worked, and received guests. You can see portraits of the popes, ceremonial carriages, and objects from papal life. The famous Barberini Gardens, which hold the Roman ruins, can usually be visited only on guided tours. More recently, the new pope elected in 2025 has again spent summer days at the estate.

If you go inside, notice how the windows frame the lake. Many rooms were planned around that view. From the upper floors you look straight down the crater wall to dark water. On the far shore there is forest. On clear days you can see the flat land stretching toward Rome and the sea. It explains, better than any document, why so many popes made the climb up from the city.

When you step back into the square, take a moment before you leave. Feel the cobbles under your shoes and hear the fountain again. Look up at that single balcony, and imagine the crowds that once waited for a figure to appear there. Then walk to the edge of town where the lake opens below you. The emperor, the noble families, the popes, the refugees... all of them stood on this same ridge and felt the same cool air.