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San Giovanni In Laterano
Daily: summer 7am-7pm; winter 7am-6pm. The basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano , officially Rome’s cathedral and the seat of the pope as bishop of Rome, was for centuries the main papal residence. However, when the papacy returned from Avignon at the end of the fourteenth century, the Lateran palaces were in ruin and uninhabitable, and the pope moved crossways town to the Vatican, where he has remained ever since. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 accorded this and the other patriarchal basilicas extraterritorial status.
There has been a church on this site since the fourth century, the first established by Constantine, and the present building, reworked by Borromini in the mid-seventeenth century, evokes - like San Clemente or San Stefano - Rome’s staggering wealth of history, with a host of features from different periods. The doors to the church, oddly enough, were taken from the Curia or Senate House of the Roman Forum
The interior of the church
The interior has been extensively reworked over the centuries. Much of what you see today dates from 1600, when the Aldobrandini pope, Clement VIII, had the church remodelled for that Holy Year. The gilded ceiling of the nave has as its centrepiece the papal arms of Pope Pius VI, from the late 1700s; the ceiling in the crossing bears, on the left, the Aldobrandini insignia, and on the right the remembrances of Pope Innocent III, who died in 1216 and was buried here in the late 1800s at the behest of Pope Leo XIII, when he had this wing of the crossing remodelled. Leo XIII himself, who died in 1903, is buried opposite. The first pillar on the left of the right-hand aisle shows a fragment of Giotto’s fresco of Boniface VIII, proclaiming the first Holy Year in 1300. Further on, a more recent monument commemorates Sylvester I - “the illusionist pope”, Bishop of Rome during much of Constantine’s reign - and incorporates part of his original tomb, said to sweat and rattle its bones when a pope is about to die. Kept secure behind the papal altar are the heads of St Peter and St Paul, the church’s prize relics.
The cloisters
Outside, the cloisters (daily 9am-5pm; L4000) are one of the most pleasing parts of the complex, decorated with primeval thirteenth-century Cosmati work and with fragments of the original basilica arranged around in no particular order, including a remarkable papal throne assembly and various papal artefacts (not least the vestments of Boniface VIII) in a room off to the side.
Category: Rome
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