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.