INTRODUCTION

A PLACE

LIKE NO OTHER

The Vatican is, in the minds of many, a building—a church, a cathedral, the majestic St. Peter’s Basilica of Michelangelo’s imagination. That’s “the Vatican.” But, strange to say, that’s “the Vatican” writ small.

It is very much more. It is also, surrounding the wonderful plaza outside “St. Pete’s,” a smallish community populated largely by priests and nuns and their associates. It is a home—of the pope, currently the phenomenally popular Francis. It is a conglomeration of several of the world’s greatest museums and libraries. It is a graveyard where lie some of history’s most famous figures, including (maybe—and we’ll get to that) Saint Peter, the first pope. It is a swirling story of endless intrigues. It is a top-tier tourist site, for many of the reasons just mentioned.

It is a city independent of Rome and a nation-state independent of Italy; in this, it’s not unlike the equally tiny Monaco, except for the obvious secular-religious divide. No casinos in the Vatican.

As with Mecca or Jerusalem or Salt Lake City, it is the place where one of the variously faithful must one day go. It is a magnet of pilgrimage and a matter of belief.

Each of these places and others central to other religions are of course special, resonant and altogether unique. And therefore, perforce, the Vatican is a place like no other—and it really is quite a place. Christianity being the world’s largest religion (2.4 billion followers) and Catholicism being such a force in the Christian community (1.2 billion adherents), the Vatican is quite a place.

Christianity might have been born in Bethlehem or Nazareth—it was certainly born in the Middle East—but the Roman Catholic Church today is housed in Rome (or, to be precise, Vatican City), where all of the history, tradition and present practice are retained and maintained. The Vatican buzzes daily, and the Catholic Church’s past, descended from Christ, buzzes day and night. In the chap-els and hallways, clerics meditate, confessions are said, tour guides lead visitors from all the continents, these visitors pause and contemplate, paintings are marveled at . . . and secrets and rumors, many of them false and some of them perhaps true, are whispered.

Our LIFE books are often tours of this or that subject—America’s splendor, the strange marvels of the deep sea, civil rights or the Civil War, outer space—anything that can be seen and, with help from the narrative, comprehended. We show what we can, and explicate or embellish what cannot be fully explained in a picture.

Here, we embark upon our tour of the Vatican and its secrets.

There is perhaps not a subject so concisely beautiful yet so outwardly mysterious.

We’re excited by the challenge, and eager for the road ahead. Let’s travel on together.

ANTONELLO NUSCA/POLARIS

AT THE HEART, ST. PETER’S. This view of the transcendent basilica is from a window in Castel Sant’Angelo (Castle of the Holy Angel), which was originally built in Rome as a mausoleum for the Roman emperor Hadrian and subsequently used as a fort by Catholic popes; it is today a museum.

We will hear much more of Michelangelo and his colleagues in building today’s Vatican, but at this early point: The young sculptor, painter and architect Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was already accomplished—he had finished his Pietà when he was just 24— when, in 1505, Pope Julius II summoned him back to Rome for a huge job: his (Julius’s) tomb. Funding for the project was dicey, and Michelangelo kept getting thrown new commissions, by Julius and other patrons in Rome and elsewhere, and the tomb wouldn’t be finished for 40 years (and even then, not to Michelangelo’s satisfaction). In the interim, all of those other commissions, the products of which today fill St. Peter’s Basilica and are manifested in its very walls, are a testimony to Michelangelo’s genius.