From Overload to Awe in Vatican City

Vatican City contains the greatest concentration of human artistic achievement on earth. It also contains, on any given morning, thirty thousand other people who know this.

We had come from Testaccio — our neighborhood for the week, a proper Roman quarter south of the center where the market and the butchers and the restaurants that feed actual Romans are found. From our San Saba apartment we caught the 23 bus, settling in among the morning commuters, riding north along the Tiber until we stepped off under the arches of Passeto di Borgo, the elevated corridor that once allowed popes to flee the Vatican for Castel Sant’Angelo in times of siege.

We walked the rest of the way on foot, rounding the high perimeter wall of Vatican City to arrive at our skip-the-line entry point on schedule — across the street from the ornate exit portal where vendors had already gathered to capitalize on the day’s outgoing tourists.

The Vatican Museums contain one of the greatest concentrations of art and antiquity in the world. They are also, in the peak hours of a warm October morning, one of the more challenging spatial experiences available to the visitor who is not fully prepared for what concentrated human traffic does to even the most magnificent halls.

We began at the beginning: sarcophagi and Egyptian relics, the collections organized chronologically through massive barrel-vaulted corridors. The scale of the museum compounds on itself — galleries leading to vestibules leading to galleries, the sequence extending far beyond what the mind can comfortably hold.

At one point I caught a glimpse through a window: Rome below, the city going about its morning, indifferent to the volume of people packed into the building above it. I exhaled. The glimpse lasted a few seconds before the current of people carried me forward.

Corralled beneath ornate ceilings in halls of maps and tapestries, the gallery corridors felt like an elegant livestock chute extending the length of a dozen football fields. At points I couldn’t see where the passage ended. An unusual claustrophobia settled in — not from the architecture, which was extraordinary, but from the density of bodies within it. I welcomed every pause in a wider domed space: the sculptures, the intricate floor mosaics, the coffered ceilings and gilded frescoes and globe paintings and tapestries. Each broader room allowed the eyes to lift and the breathing to ease.

The Sistine Chapel arrived at the end of the museum sequence, smaller than expected, packed. Security moved visitors along the perimeter or contained them in a central viewing area. I did my best to see Michelangelo’s ceiling — the Creation of Adam, the prophets and sibyls in their niches, the Last Judgment on the altar wall — under the conditions available. What I felt most clearly was relief when we exited into the open air.

The courtyards were a different world. In the Giardino Quadrato, water trickled from a large urn into the basin below — a quiet sound in a quiet space, the city held at a remove.

The Cortile della Pigna held the 2nd-century bronze pinecone on its enormous apse-shaped pedestal, and at the courtyard’s center, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Sphere Within Sphere turned slowly on its axis, its outer shell cracked open to reveal gears and a smaller sphere within — a piece of modern art inserted into antiquity with the confidence of a city that has been doing exactly this for two thousand years.

After exiting the museum, a fifteen-minute walk around the perimeter wall — past the Swiss Guards in their distinctive striped attire standing at their posts — brought us to Saint Peter’s Square. We entered through a large brick archway and into the covered colonnade walkway, the sound of water reaching us before the scale did.

Then the piazza opened: Bernini’s embracing arms of colonnades sweeping around the oval space, 140 statues lining the rooflines, the Egyptian obelisk at the center flanked by two fountains — Bernini’s on the right, Maderno’s on the left — their water catching the midday light. The space is enormous and somehow not intimidating. It invites.

Saint Peter’s Basilica was an entirely different experience from the museums. The vast interior volume didn’t confine — it released. Light filled the golden nave from windows set high in the clerestory, the polished gray marble and gilded barrel vaults pulling the eye upward in the way that great sacred spaces are designed to do. I stopped before reaching the baldacchino.

In a side chapel to the right of the entrance, behind protective glass, Michelangelo’s Pietà. I had studied it in art history — the image in a textbook, the smooth marble, Mary’s serenity holding the lifeless weight of her son. Seeing it in person, at scale, was one of those moments when the studied image and the real thing finally occupy the same space and the real thing wins. The serenity of the figure is not a formal choice; it is a spiritual argument, and you feel it directly.

Beyond the Pietà, the full spatial sequence of the basilica unfolded: the giant archways framing the side aisles, the Baldacchino rising under the dome at the crossing — Bernini’s bronze canopy, 29 meters high, its twisted columns spiraling upward over the tomb of Saint Peter — and behind it, Bernini’s Altar of the Chair at the apse, the golden alabaster window glowing as morning light came through from the east, the gilded bronze throne in front of it. Every element was considered. The building was made to overwhelm with purpose, which is different from simply overwhelming.

Near the Altar of the Chair, a group of Catholic nuns entered the basilica for what was clearly the first time — their faces carrying an emotion that crossed from reverence into something closer to joy. We aren’t religious, and we felt it anyway: the privilege of witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime moment for someone else. That is the other thing Saint Peter’s does. It holds space for meaning it didn’t produce, including your own.

We stayed as long as we wanted. Afterward, we walked the full circumference of the piazza — the colonnades, the fountains, the obelisk seen from all angles — before finding Old Bridge Gelateria on the far side and joining the line. Then the metro at Ottaviano, Line A back to Piramide, and the walk home through Testaccio in the afternoon light.

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Vatican City connects to the Italy Atlas and the Rome section. Read the practical guide to planning your visit → and the Rome pages for the broader context of this first October 2019 trip →