Santa Maria Maggiore Tickets

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Walk to the middle of the nave. Look straight up. The coffered ceiling is gilded, and by tradition the gold was the first ever brought back from the Americas – Columbus’s haul, handed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to Pope Alexander VI.

Now raise your eyes to the top of the walls. That band of small mosaics above the columns is 5th-century work: Old Testament scenes, among the earliest images of the Virgin Mary anywhere in Rome, set here when Pope Sixtus III consecrated the basilica in 434.

Keep walking to the far end. The apse opens overhead in gold – the Coronation of the Virgin, signed by the friar Jacopo Torriti in 1295.

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Turn off the right of the nave into the Pauline Chapel, and you meet the Salus Populi Romani: a Byzantine icon of the Madonna and Child, long revered as the protectress of the Roman people. This is the icon Pope Francis prayed before at the start and end of every journey, and the reason he asked to be buried a few steps away.

Head back to the centre. Take the stairs beside the high altar down into the Confessio, the sunken shrine below it. The crystal reliquary you’ll find there holds wood that tradition ties to the manger of Bethlehem – the relic of the Holy Crib.

As you pass the basilica’s own Sistine Chapel, look down: a worn marble slab set in the floor nearby is the grave of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor who shaped Baroque Rome.

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Cross to the left aisle, between the Pauline and Sforza chapels and near the altar of St Francis, and you reach the newest thing in this ancient church. Pope Francis was buried here on 26 April 2025, the first pope in over a century laid to rest outside the Vatican.

It is exactly what he asked for in his will: a single slab of pale marble set in the floor, undecorated, with one word – FRANCISCUS. On the wall above hangs a silver copy of his pectoral cross, the Good Shepherd.

The tomb has been open since 27 April, and you’ll usually join a quiet line filing past it, often with a single white rose left on the stone.

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There’s a second set of mosaics you won’t see from the floor. Above the entrance, behind the 18th-century arches Ferdinando Fuga added, a golden façade laid around 1300 by Filippo Rusuti shows Christ enthroned among the saints, with the Miracle of the Snow below.

From the square you can only squint at it through the openings. To stand level with it, you take the guided tour out onto the Loggia delle Benedizioni itself.

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The other ticketed route runs the opposite way – down. Below the basilica lie the remains of Roman buildings, and the prize is a rare painted calendar: month-by-month scenes of farm work along the wall, the only Roman fresco of its kind in the city.

Around it sit the raised floors and cavities of an old bath house, built to let heat run under the stone. You reach it on the underground tour, about fifty minutes on foot down stairs, and not one for under-7s.