St. Peter's Basilica

You come out of a street into a vast oval of open ground, and two great curving arms of columns sweep around you. Ahead rises a wide stone front, and above it a huge dome floats against the sky. The space is so large that it takes a moment for your eyes to measure it. People look small crossing the paving. This is St. Peter's, at the edge of the Vatican.

Begin in the square itself. Two broad rows of columns, four deep, reach out from the church like arms held open to gather a crowd. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed this colonnade in the seventeenth century. He wanted every arriving pilgrim to feel welcomed, drawn in, almost embraced by the church before reaching its doors. Stand between the curving ranks of columns and feel how they enclose the great open space without closing it.

At the center of the square stands a tall Egyptian obelisk of red granite. It is very old, carried to Rome in ancient times. For centuries it stood in a Roman circus that lay nearby, a place linked by long tradition to the death of Saint Peter himself. Later it was moved, with enormous effort, to stand here at the heart of the square, a single plain finger of stone pointing at the sky.

The church behind it took more than a hundred years to raise. Work on the present basilica began in 1506 and reached completion in 1626. Some of the greatest architects of their age each gave a part of their lives to it. Donato Bramante began the design. Michelangelo, in his old age, shaped the dome. Carlo Maderno built the long nave and the wide front you now face. Each handed the work to the next.

Look up at the dome. Michelangelo designed it late in his life, though he died before it was complete, and others raised it to his plan. It climbs far above the rest of the city. From many streets and bridges across Rome you can catch it floating over the rooftops, round and pale, a fixed point you can steer by from a great distance away.

Step through the doors, and the scale changes once again. The nave runs ahead of you like an immense hall, far longer than the eye first allows, lit by light falling from high windows. Markers set into the floor show the lengths of other great churches of the world, each one reaching only part of the way down this single aisle. Everything is built to make a person feel small before something larger.

Near the entrance, on the right, stands a sculpture set behind glass. This is Michelangelo's Pieta, carved around 1499, when the artist was still a young man. It shows Mary holding the body of her grown son across her lap. The marble looks soft as cloth and skin, the grief held quiet rather than cried out. It is the only work Michelangelo ever signed, his name cut along the band across Mary's breast.

Walk on toward the center, beneath the dome. There a great canopy of dark bronze rises on four twisting columns, high as a building. Bernini made it to mark the most sacred point of the whole church, the place directly above the tomb believed to hold Saint Peter. The canopy is enormous, and yet, standing under that vast dome, it settles into proportion, neither lost nor overwhelming.

The entire church is built over that tomb. By long tradition, Saint Peter, a fisherman who became the first leader of the church, was put to death in Rome and buried on this hill. The first basilica was raised over the grave in the fourth century. The church you stand in replaced that older one, on the very same holy ground, so that the altar still rises directly above the spot.

Move through it slowly and let your eyes wander. Colored marble sheathes the walls and piers. Gold gleams in the curved vaults overhead. Light falls in long, slow shafts from the high windows. Side chapels open one after another, each with its own altar, its own tomb or painting. There is far more gathered here than a single visit can take in or hold.

Think of the millions who have crossed this floor before you. Pilgrims who walked for months to arrive. The grieving and the hopeful. Visitors from every part of the earth, in every kind of dress, speaking every language. They have all stood beneath this same dome and looked up into the same height, each carrying their own private reason for coming.

Find a quieter place along one of the sides and pause. Let the great height of the space settle slowly over you. Whatever you believe or do not believe, this is a room built to lift the eyes upward and still the voice in the throat. When you are ready, walk back out between Bernini's columns, and step again into the open light of the square.