Holy places built on Vatican Hill for reason

ROME — There's a reason St. Peter's Basilica was built where it stands. A reason Michelangelo's dome, Bernini's spiral-columned canopy and the main altar are all precisely where they are.

It's found in a single verse from the Gospel of Matthew: "And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church."

For 1,700 years, dating back to the construction of the original St. Peter's by the emperor Constantine, Roman Catholic tradition has held that the main altar stands directly over St. Peter's tomb. Today, a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands who visit St. Peter's each year are guided back through time, along an ancient subterranean path between two rows of fragile pagan and Christian tombs to view the evidence: a small pillar reputed to be part of one of the earliest monuments over the saint's grave, a wall that once bore a faint Greek inscription sometimes translated as "Peter is here," and 18 small bones enclosed in two plastic glass boxes, viewed through a small ragged hole in a wall 33 feet below the floor of the modern basilica.

Long obscured by Constantine's landfill to create a flat plane on Vatican Hill for construction of the greatest church in Christendom, then built upon not once but twice, the ancient cemetery lay all but forgotten from the fourth century until 1939. Only then, when workers excavating a tomb for the recently deceased Pope Pius XI broke through a wall beneath the church, was the ancient burial ground rediscovered.

Slow, careful excavation during the next 11 years opened more than 20 ancient tombs and led to the eventual discovery of bones determined to be those of a 60- to 70-year-old man who had died nearly 1,900 years earlier. In 1968, Pope Paul VI declared, despite doubts raised by a Jesuit archaeologist who had been in on the dig from the beginning, that the church was satisfied that the bones were St. Peter's.

Today, the site is one of the holiest places in Rome, and because of its fragile nature, one visited by only a few who think weeks ahead and write to the Ufficio Scavi (Excavations Office) and ask to be included in one of the small, 90-minute guided tours.

Two thousand years ago, the oblong arena of emperor Nero's circus stretched nearly 2,000 feet from what is now the entrance to St. Peter's Square to beyond the basilica and just left of a center line bisecting the basilica along its length.

Tradition holds that Peter was crucified, upside down, in the circus in 64 A.D., then buried just outside its walls. In time, after the persecution of Christians had subsided, successively larger monuments were erected over the grave.