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Chapter Five

Vatican Hill

Today Vatican City, measuring 110 acres, is the seat of the Catholic Church, home of the pope, and the smallest sovereign state in the world. More than half of it consists of gardens, some dating back to A.D. 1200. In addition to St. Peter’s Square and the Renaissance-era St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City contains perhaps the greatest collection of historical art and statuary in the world. In the Vatican Museum, the history of the West is contained in ancient statues like the Three Graces weaving, nurturing, and finally cutting the Thread of Life. The full-size statue of Caesar Augustus (Prima Porta Augustus) stares down as if frozen in the first century, while Madonnas by Titian and Raphael are mixed with Da Vinci’s St. Jerome in the Wilderness, leading to Michelangelo’s great ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

Immediately outside the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo executed his last great fresco, The Crucifixion of St. Peter. The image depicts Peter crucified upside down on Vatican Hill. Michelangelo even depicted himself as a sad bystander, observing Peter’s death. Little did he know that his painting would become both a clue and a confirmation in the search for Peter centuries later.

A gallery of more than three thousand stone tablets and inscriptions describes history, along with the funeral sarcophagus of Roman Empress Helena of the West (who also played a part in the story of the search for Peter). But amazingly and totally unknown to the world until the Apostle Project, the greatest historical gallery of the Vatican was not in the Vatican but under it, where the history of an age lay silent, frozen, and inviolate for almost two thousand years.

To understand the complexity of the Apostle Project undertaken by Pius XII, one must travel back almost two millennia. In fact, Vatican Hill has a complex history and structure. The hill that now boasts the enormous St. Peter’s Basilica was once a worthless, sandy hill located outside the walls of Rome. Unusable for farming, for uncounted centuries it had been used as a dumping ground for bodies of slaves, animals, and the poor. It lay west of the Tiber River and the heart of Rome. Caligula built a racetrack near the hill during his reign, and nearby were the gardens where Nero would inflict his cruelty.

Within a short time after Peter’s death, Christians began to worship secretly at a spot on Vatican Hill where they believed Peter had been buried.⁴¹ Through waves of persecution as the years went on, Christians would climb the hill to the place where they believed Peter had been buried. But the hill did not long remain vacant. Prominent pagan families began to use the area as a burial ground, and the hill gradually became a necropolis of 250 years’ worth of mostly pagan graves.

The worst of the persecutions of Christians — under the emperors Valerian and Diocletian — occurred around 250 to 313, after which the storm lifted. The persecutions largely came to an end when the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 300–337) rose to power.⁴² After his 312 victory at Milvian Bridge, where he claimed to see a cross in the sky with the words, “In this sign you shall conquer,”⁴³ he took control of the western Roman Empire and, together with the emperor of the East, published the Edict of Milan, thus granting Christians the freedom to worship.⁴⁴ Later, when he gained control of the whole Roman Empire, Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople. He apparently remained a pagan for most or all of his life, but he acceded to the requests of his Christian mother, Helena, and allowed a church to be built over the site traditionally held to be Peter’s grave near the top of Vatican Hill.⁴⁵

The planned church needed a level foundation, and Vatican Hill was anything but flat. Peter’s purported grave stood near, but not at the top, surrounded by the family tombs of numerous prominent families. Desecration of these burial sites would generate widespread hatred of the emperor. The Romans — perhaps history’s greatest engineers — solved the problem by filling the hill with millions of feet of fill around the numerous existing pagan tombs.⁴⁶ The effect was to create a vast, hidden, underground necropolis, which would remain frozen in time and space under the new church.

Roman Family Tombs

The supreme memorial to a Roman family’s dignity and history was its family tomb, containing the ashes, busts, and portraits of generations of family members, many going back hundreds of years. In Rome, the basic social unit was the family. The pater familias — the senior male — had the power of life and death over all family members and was in turn himself responsible to the Republic for their actions. Much of the standing and dignitas of a citizen was his family’s standing. The family tomb thus became, in effect, a museum of family history (and with it the history of Rome), designed to celebrate ancestors while impressing passers-by with the family’s gravitas. The most well-known entrance to Rome — the Appian Way — was lined on either side by many of the family tombs of the great families of Roman history, such as the Julia, Scipii, Horatia, Cornelii, and Graccii families.⁴⁷ It is no accident that the poet Thomas Babington Macaulay portrays the legendary Roman hero Horatius, facing certain death defending a bridge in Rome, proclaiming:

To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods?⁴⁸

Centuries of looting began with the Visigoths’ conquest and sack of Rome in 410, followed by the Vandals in 455, the Saracens in 846, and the Germans in 1527. The great family tombs of the Appian Way were reduced to ruins.⁴⁹ With the barbarian invasions, the Empire died. Rome became a city of ancient ruins, the Colosseum half collapsed, the Forum and Senate House mere rubble, and famous baths and homes now merely stones and fading memories. But the family tombs under the Vatican had a different fate. As civilization in the West died to a flicker with the great barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, even the memory of the legendary surviving family tombs inadvertently preserved by Constantine under the Vatican disappeared. Because of Constantine’s engineering, they (unlike the tombs on the Appian Way) survived the great invasions of Rome. Unknown to the invaders, they remained wholly intact as they had been in 337 when they were buried beneath the newly constructed basilica. The outside world knew only of a few legends and ancient writings in the Vatican archives about Peter’s grave. The rest of the tombs beneath the basilica were left suspended in time and space.

Outside, the world changed. The capital of the Empire was moved to Constantinople, where it would exist for one thousand years until the Turkish conquest in 1453. Eventually the capital of the Western Empire would move again, this time to Ravenna. Rome moved from the center of the Roman world to its periphery. In the late fourth century, the Roman legions, once the dominant military force of the world, were shattered — first by war between themselves. Then waves of invaders, like wolves sensing the weakness of their prey, brought the Empire in the West to an end. The Visigoths under Alaric shattered the Roman armies while looting Rome. They were followed by the Vandals, whose name survives as a description of their habit of pointless destruction. Because of faith or superstition, these hordes did not destroy the wooded St. Peter’s Basilica itself, although the Vandals certainly stripped and looted it. But with the death of all involved in the construction of the church, the destruction of the great families of Rome, and the eradication of almost all written records relating to St. Peter’s (as well as almost all those who could read them), the waves of destruction passed through Rome and the West leaving the forgotten tombs buried underneath St. Peter’s unknown and untouched.

When literacy and learning began to return to the West, there were no records left to tell the popes or Michelangelo, Raphael, the Medici, or Bernini that a few yards beneath their feet lay one of the greatest surviving storehouses of Roman art and history in the world. Ironically, the tombs hidden below the feet of the famed Renaissance painters and sculptors held early versions, some 1,500 years old, of many of the same themes embraced by Titian, Botticelli, Rubens, and many great painters. Leda met the Swan and beautiful Venus reclined in the dark-filled tombs unknown to the world.

The New Basilica

St. Peter’s Basilica, as constructed, was built of wood and measured over 340 feet in length. It was completed around 337 and became the focal point of Christianity for 1,200 years. In the wooden church, much of the history of the West occurred. It housed events such as the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West in 800. Numerous kings and emperors were enthroned and buried there. More than two hundred popes over one thousand years were elected and then enthroned within its walls. They ranged from saints and heroes to the Borgia popes indifferent to the spiritual. But the long parade of popes and history did not disturb the ancient tombs underneath the basilica. The tombs continued their long sleep, unknown to the world. Although for most of its life located outside Rome’s walls, defenseless and made of wood, the old basilica, while often looted, was amazingly never burned or destroyed.

Around 1450, it became apparent that the one-thousand-year-old wooden church was beginning to collapse. Popes Nicholas V and Julius II were determined to replace the old St. Peter’s with a new, immense basilica. Old St. Peter’s had survived the Vandals and the Saracens, but it did not survive the grand reconstruction plans. The historic St. Peter’s was almost totally destroyed, mindlessly obliterating wonderful artwork, sculpture, and crypts, many dating back one thousand years.

Among the destroyed works of art were frescoes and mosaics created by Giotto and other masters of the late Middle Ages. Tragically, these works survive now only in ancient accounts and scattered fragments. The tombs of more than one hundred popes were eradicated, along with other burial sites and memorials. In fact, the destruction wrought by the construction vastly exceeded that caused by time and even the waves of looters. Thankfully, the builders did leave intact the old altar and foundations, simply building over them. Beneath it all, the Necropolis continued its thousand-year sleep, remaining unknown and untouched through the construction of the immense new church.

Pope Julius II, the moving force behind the new St. Peter’s, intended to have a vast tomb for himself on the main floor of the new basilica. The tomb was to be constructed by Michelangelo. Although Michelangelo constructed a much reduced model of the vast tomb Julius intended, it was placed in a different church after Julius’s death, and Julius never rested there. Instead, in an illustration of the vagaries of politics, pomp, and power, the immensely powerful Julius was buried without a monument of any kind in the floor of the Vatican. Today he is remembered only by a simple and difficult to locate marble slab.

In 1626, an excavation to install Bernini’s bronze baldacchino⁵⁰ deeply encroached into the Necropolis.⁵¹ The excavation revealed various pagan tombs including a sarcophagus of one Flavius Agricola.⁵² Flavius, whose image reclined full length with a wine cup on the lid, advised through an inscription:

Mix the wine, drink deep, wreathed in flowers, and do not refuse to pleasure pretty girls. When death comes, earth and fire devour all.⁵³

The priests and workmen, horrified by the discovery of a pagan libertine rather than a saint beneath the basilica’s main altar, immediately dumped portions of the sarcophagus into the Tiber, sealed the site, and kept the inscription secret in the Vatican Library. This was, after all, the notorious era of the “fig leaf campaign,” when nude portions of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment were painted over or covered and fig leaves painted over ancient Roman statues in the Vatican.

Periodic later excavations likewise found pagan graves rather than saints, suggesting the horrifying possibility that the great seat of Christianity rested not on the tomb of saints, but on the graves of pagans. As mentioned earlier, Protestant leaders such as Luther questioned whether Peter had ever come to Rome at all.⁵⁴ They denounced as frauds the great basilica and the papacy itself, which claimed to be descended from Peter.

In 1939, the long sleep of two millennia was about to end. In February of that year, at his specific request, Pope Pius XI was buried in grottos under the altar of St. Peter’s, alongside Emperor Otto II of Germany, King James III of England,⁵⁵ Queen Christina of Sweden,⁵⁶ and many other popes and kings. The Church determined not only to honor his wish to be buried in the grottos, but also to surround the grave with a chapel.

Because the grottos had low ceilings, it was decided to lower the floor to create the chapel. Digging almost immediately uncovered beneath the floor shockingly beautiful, brightly colored, and vivid mortuary murals of cranes, flowers, dolphins, pygmies, and even Venus rising from the sea.⁵⁷ After first finding the elaborate tomb of a consul’s daughter, the diggers came upon the grave of a young and clearly beloved Christian woman named Aemilia Gorgania.⁵⁸ She had been a twenty-eight-year-old wife, famous in Rome around A.D. 150 for her beauty and innocence. She was surrounded by Christian inscriptions including one in early Latin reading, “Dormit in pace” (“rests in peace”)⁵⁹ together with a drawing of a woman drawing water from a well (a familiar early Christian motif for the refreshment of heaven, which also represented the story of the Samaritan woman — Christ’s unlikely first messenger to a Samaritan village). Next to her were the words “sweet souled Gorgania.” In a short time, other astounding discoveries of bejeweled Romans and tombs were made in the Necropolis. The work was halted and Pius XII informed of the discoveries.

Pius XII now confronted a difficult decision — namely, whether to continue to excavate under the foundations, possibly proving once and for all that Peter was not buried there, or to cease the digging as in 1626, treating the excavation as if it never happened and sealing any records in the Vatican Library. Pius XII made the incredibly brave decision to pursue the excavation. Unlike the excavators in 1626, Pius XII chose to pursue the truth. The search for the Apostle had begun, in the dark, early days of World War II. It would not end for nearly seventy-five years.