Vatican City Culture & Language

The Vatican’s culture is the Catholic Church’s, and its most visible expression is an art collection assembled over five centuries by patrons who could commission anyone.

The Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512, reluctantly — he considered himself a sculptor and resented the commission — working on scaffolding of his own design rather than, as the legend has it, flat on his back. He returned in his sixties to paint the Last Judgement on the altar wall, whose nudity was partly painted over after his death by an artist nicknamed the breeches-maker. The chapel is also where a conclave elects a pope, and the stove that produces the white smoke is installed there for it.

Raphael

The Raphael Rooms were painted at the same time as the ceiling, a few hundred metres away, and the fresco at the centre of them — Plato and Aristotle walking through an assembly of the ancient philosophers — is one of the defining images of the Renaissance.

Sculpture and antiquity

The Laocoon, dug up in a Roman vineyard in 1506 and bought by the pope within hours, and the Apollo Belvedere shaped how Europe understood classical sculpture for three centuries.

The basilica itself

St Peter’s took some 120 years and the work of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini, each revising or overturning what the last had begun. Michelangelo took the dome on in his seventies without payment and did not live to see it finished. The building is so large that the interior defeats the eye — the lettering around the base of the dome is nearly two metres high and reads as ordinary script from the floor, and markers set into the nave show how far the great churches of other countries would reach if placed inside it.

The library and archives

The Vatican Apostolic Library holds around 75,000 manuscripts, and the archives — renamed from Secret Archives in 2019 — open to accredited researchers.

Music

The Sistine Chapel Choir is among the oldest in the world, and Allegri’s Miserere was famously its guarded property until Mozart, at fourteen, wrote it out from memory.

Italian is the working language of the Vatican and what you will hear and see on signs, alongside Latin, which remains the official language of the Holy See’s formal documents and the language the cash machines once offered as an option.

Latin is still used for papal documents, some liturgy and the official acts of the state — a living administrative language in one of the very few places that still treats it as such.

The Swiss Guard command language is German, a legacy of recruitment from the Swiss cantons.

English is widely spoken by museum staff, guides and clergy, and audio guides and tours are available in many languages. A visitor needs no Italian.

Useful Italian anyway: buongiorno, grazie, permesso to get past someone in a crowd, and dov’e for where is.