Things to Do in Vatican City (2026)

Vatican City · VA

Laocoön

In the heart of the Vatican Museums, one marble sculpture tells the story of how an entire world-famous art collection began. The Laocoön is a life-sized group depicting the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons in their final, agonising struggle against the sea serpents sent by the gods to punish him for warning Troy about the wooden horse. Every visitor who walks into the Octagonal Courtyard stops here — not just because the carving is breathtaking, but because this single discovery on a Roman hillside in January 1506 became the seed from which the Vatican Museums grew. Carved around 40–30 BCE by three sculptors from the island of Rhodes — Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus — the group captures a moment of raw physical and emotional intensity that has stunned artists for over two millennia. Michelangelo, Raphael, and Rubens all bowed before it. If you are already walking through the Vatican Museums, this is the piece that deserves a long, lingering pause before the crowds move on to the Sistine Chapel.

Catholic church

Vatican City · VA

Tomb of Saint Peter

Beneath the magnificent dome of St. Peter's Basilica lies one of Christianity's most sacred sites: the tomb of the Apostle Peter. From the gleaming Confessio visible at the basilica floor, through the hushed papal Grottoes one level below, to the 2,000-year-old burial ground of the Vatican Necropolis deep underground, visitors can trace three distinct layers of encounter with this extraordinary place. The Necropolis — the only part requiring advance booking and a paid guided tour — reveals a preserved Roman cemetery where Peter was laid to rest after his crucifixion on the Vatican Hill. The Grottoes and Confessio, freely accessible during basilica hours, offer powerful proximity to the apostle's burial site without any reservation.

Garden

Vatican City · VA

Pinecone Courtyard

High in the Vatican Museums, past the galleries and just before the gardens, an open-air terrace opens beneath the sky and a colossal ancient pinecone. This is the Cortile della Pigna, the Pinecone Courtyard—named for the enormous 1st-to-2nd-century bronze pine cone that crowns its far wall, set within a vast half-dome niche and flanked by two bronze peacocks. A grassed, sunlit garden framed by Renaissance architecture, it is one of the quietest and most atmospheric spaces in the museum route, and the courtyard that closes Bramante's grand vision. What makes the Pinecone Courtyard special is the layering of two thousand years of history in one view: a Roman fountain sculpture that once stood near the Pantheon and later in the atrium of Old St. Peter's, set into a monumental niche built by Pirro Ligorio in the 1560s, inside a courtyard that began as Donato Bramante's ambitious Belvedere garden for Pope Julius II. A modern bronze globe and a nod from Dante complete the scene.

Basilica

Vatican City · VA

Saint Peter’s Basilica

Rising from the western edge of Rome across the Tiber, St. Peter's Basilica is the beating heart of the Catholic world and one of the most ambitious buildings ever raised. Its Late Renaissance and Baroque nave, crowned by Michelangelo's dome and swept around by Bernini's colonnade, can gather up to 20,000 worshippers at once. Entering is free, yet the artistic and spiritual riches within rival any museum on earth. Built over the traditional tomb of the apostle Saint Peter, the basilica was raised between 1506 and 1626 on the site of Constantine's 4th-century church, with Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini each leaving their mark. Today visitors move beneath a dome that soars to roughly 136 metres and through a nave some 187 metres long, past Michelangelo's tender Pietà and Bernini's towering bronze Baldacchino.

Plaza

Vatican City · VA

Saint Peter's Square

Saint Peter's Square is the monumental elliptical piazza that serves as the grand threshold to Vatican City, designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini between 1656 and 1667 to embrace pilgrims in what he called the "maternal arms of the Church." Sweeping colonnades of 284 Doric columns, crowned by 140 statues of saints, curve around an ancient Egyptian obelisk and twin fountains, creating one of the world's most recognizable public spaces. Whether you arrive for the Sunday Angelus blessing, the Wednesday Papal Audience, or simply to stand in awe beneath Baroque geometry, the square rewards both the contemplative visitor and the curious photographer. It is free to enter, open around the clock, and large enough to hold 300,000 people on the grandest occasions—yet quiet enough at dawn to feel like your own private discovery.

Art museum

Vatican City · VA

Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums are not a single building but a city of art within Vatican City: a labyrinth of palaces, courtyards and galleries holding tens of thousands of works gathered by the popes over five centuries, all on one long route that builds toward a single overwhelming finale—the Sistine Chapel. Here you walk beneath Michelangelo's ceiling, through Raphael's frescoes, down a 120-metre corridor of painted maps of Italy, and past some of the most celebrated statues of antiquity. For most first-time visitors it is the high point of any trip to Rome, and it rewards planning: the lines can be long, the complex is genuinely huge, and the experience is far richer when you know which rooms deserve your lingering and which to pass briskly. Book ahead, wear comfortable shoes and respectful clothing, and give yourself at least half a day.

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A little more
of Vatican City.

Laocoön

Tomb of Saint Peter

Pinecone Courtyard

Saint Peter’s Basilica

Saint Peter's Square

Vatican Museums

Finding your next place…

A little more
of Vatican City.

Laocoön

Tomb of Saint Peter

Pinecone Courtyard

Saint Peter’s Basilica

Saint Peter's Square

Vatican Museums