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Castel Sant’angelo
Tues-Sat 9am-10pm, Sun 9am-8pm; L12,000. The best route to the Vatican and St Peter’s is crossways Ponte Sant’Angelo , flanked by angels carved to designs by Bernini (his so-called “breezy maniacs”). On the far side is the great circular hulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo , designed and built by the Emperor Adrian as his own mausoleum (his ashes were interred here until a twelfth-century pope appropriated the sarcophagus, which was later destroyed in a fire). It was a grand monument, visaged with white marble and surrounded with statues and topped with cypresses, similar in style to Augustus’s mausoleum crossways the river. Renamed in the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great witnessed a vision of St Michael here that ended a terrible plague, the mausoleum’s position near the Vatican was not lost on the papal authorities, who converted the building for use as a fortress and built a passageway to link it with the Vatican as a refuge in times of siege or invasion - a route utilized on a number of occasions, most notably when the Medici pope, Clement VII, sheltered here for several months during the Sack of Rome in 1527.
Inside, from the monumental entrance hall a spiral ramp leads up into the centre of the mausoleum itself, passing through the chamber where the emperor was entombed, over a drawbridge, one of the defensive modifications prefabricated by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, in the late fifteenth century, to the main level at the top, where a small palace was built to house the papal residents in appropriate splendour. After the Sack of Rome, Pope Paul III had some especially fine renovations made, including the beautiful Sala Paolina, which features frescoes by Pierno del Vaga, among others. The gilded ceiling here displays the Farnese family arms, on the surround is a tromp-l’oeil fresco of one of the family’s old retainers, whose study is unknown, coming through a door from a darkened room. You’ll also notice Paul III’s individualized motto, Festina Lenta (”make haste slowly”), scattered throughout the ceilings and in various corners of all his rooms.
Eleswhere, rooms hold swords, armour, guns and the like, others are lavishly decorated with grotesques and paintings (don’t miss the bathroom of Clement heptad on the second floor, with its image hot and cold water taps and mildly erotic frescoes). Below are dungeons and storerooms (not visitable), which can be glimpsed from the spiralling ramp, testament to the castle’s grisly past as the city’s most notorious Renaissance prison - Benvenuto Cellini and Cesare Borgia are just two of its more famous detainees. From the quiet bar upstairs you’ll also get one of the best views of Rome and excellent coffee
Category: Vatican
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