Pontifical Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs (Scala Santa) site features

It stands across a wide road from the Lateran, and from outside it is sober to the point of plain. A square block with an arcaded ground floor and rows of pedimented windows above, and running across the upper storey a carved band of Roman capitals: SIXTVS V FECIT — Sixtus V made this. The pope who moved the stairs here put his name along the front of the building he moved them into.

Inside, the room is almost entirely staircase. Five parallel flights climb together from the floor to a landing high at the back, separated by low walls. The central one is the Holy Stairs; the four beside it are ordinary steps, and they exist because the middle one is not.

Nobody walks up the middle. People go up it on their knees, one step at a time, pausing on each — which means the central flight moves at a completely different speed from the ones either side, and the room is quiet in a way that a building full of people usually is not. There are twenty-eight steps. The ascent takes most people twenty minutes or more.

The walls and ceiling are painted from floor to vault in faded sixteenth-century fresco — crowded scenes in ochre and dull red, framed in painted architecture, with a Latin inscription band above the far end.

At the top, behind a grille, is a small dark chapel. This is the Sancta Sanctorum, the popes' private chapel, with a Cosmatesque floor of inlaid stone discs and thirteenth-century frescoes, and in it the icon of the Saviour. It is the one part that costs money, and you look into it rather than walk about in it.

The Holy Stairs

Twenty-eight white marble steps, by tradition brought from Jerusalem by Saint Helena around 326 and believed to be the stairs from Pontius Pilate's palace. May only be ascended on the knees.

Fontana's four side flights

Built around the central stair in 1589, so that anyone who will not or cannot kneel reaches the same landing. Part of the original design.

The Sancta Sanctorum

The Chapel of San Lorenzo in Palatio, the popes' old private chapel: 13th-century frescoes and a Cosmatesque floor arranged under Nicholas III. The ticketed part, and it closes earlier.

The Uronica

An icon of Christ Pantocrator in the chapel, supposedly begun by Saint Luke and finished by an angel.

The Sixtus V inscription

SIXTVS V FECIT, carved across the front of the building the pope raised for the stairs in 1589.

The wood and the marble

Cased by Benedict XIII in 1724; uncovered following restoration in 2019.