St. Peter's Crypt
My last post from our vacation this summer (only took me a quarter to finish!)
We booked a visit to St. Peter's Basilica crypt. We booked the crypt very early in the process and worked the rest of the day around it.
The tickets are booked on this website. They group according to language and the groups are quite small. They cap visitors to 250 people per day. Ours was "large" at 14 people. The tickets were 12 EUR. No children under 15. You must wear church appropriate clothing. No photos allowed.
You need to be at the Excavation office ten minutes early, which really means arriving about 10-15 minutes before that. We had to go through two additional security checkpoints before we even got to the office. We were luck enough that our guide was willing to let us still join the tour.
The first portion of the tour is focused on the Roman grave site that St. Peter's is built on top of. The graves are fascinating. They used the same days of the week, months as we do and often many of our names are the same like Alexander and Maximilian. Each tomb is a small room.
We then moved to where St. Peter is buried. The altar is right above his burial. There are a number of reasons they believe that they truly have found where St. Peter is buried including genetic testing of the bones, the legacy of the location itself, the age of the graffiti on the site. This was a common location for non-Roman citizens to have been killed earlier in Roman periods. Slowly though, the location of the Roman citizen graves moved further from the city encroaching on the location of St. Peter's bones. You get to see the box his bones are in from all sides.
We also got to visit the private chapel of the Pope, which is below the main altar of St. Peter's, and directly above the location of his bones.
Also one last note, the tour ends in the grotto, which is in the basilica. If we had known this, we probably would have avoided the rush to St. Peter's for the morning. You get to avoid the lines, which I had been so worried about waiting in -- which I was right, were extensive.
Jason thought it was a pretty awesome site with the necropolis underneath the basilica. He was very happy we had booked it in advance and spent the time there.
Time in crypt: 1.5 hrs
We booked a visit to St. Peter's Basilica crypt. We booked the crypt very early in the process and worked the rest of the day around it.
The tickets are booked on this website. They group according to language and the groups are quite small. They cap visitors to 250 people per day. Ours was "large" at 14 people. The tickets were 12 EUR. No children under 15. You must wear church appropriate clothing. No photos allowed.
You need to be at the Excavation office ten minutes early, which really means arriving about 10-15 minutes before that. We had to go through two additional security checkpoints before we even got to the office. We were luck enough that our guide was willing to let us still join the tour.
The first portion of the tour is focused on the Roman grave site that St. Peter's is built on top of. The graves are fascinating. They used the same days of the week, months as we do and often many of our names are the same like Alexander and Maximilian. Each tomb is a small room.
We then moved to where St. Peter is buried. The altar is right above his burial. There are a number of reasons they believe that they truly have found where St. Peter is buried including genetic testing of the bones, the legacy of the location itself, the age of the graffiti on the site. This was a common location for non-Roman citizens to have been killed earlier in Roman periods. Slowly though, the location of the Roman citizen graves moved further from the city encroaching on the location of St. Peter's bones. You get to see the box his bones are in from all sides.
We also got to visit the private chapel of the Pope, which is below the main altar of St. Peter's, and directly above the location of his bones.
Also one last note, the tour ends in the grotto, which is in the basilica. If we had known this, we probably would have avoided the rush to St. Peter's for the morning. You get to avoid the lines, which I had been so worried about waiting in -- which I was right, were extensive.
Jason thought it was a pretty awesome site with the necropolis underneath the basilica. He was very happy we had booked it in advance and spent the time there.
Time in crypt: 1.5 hrs
Times visited: 1
Overall: A
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