Bramante Staircase

Two spiral staircases in the Vatican Museums share Bramante's name, and they are four centuries apart. The original was built in 1505 by Donato Bramante inside a square tower of the Belvedere palace of Pope Innocent VIII. It is not really a staircase at all but a spiral ramp, with herringbone paving, gentle enough for pack animals and, according to tradition, for Pope Julius II to be carried up to his residence without leaving his carriage. Thirty-six granite columns ring the open core, and with each turn of the spiral the order of the columns changes, rising from Tuscan through Doric, Ionic and Corinthian to Composite at the top. The columns also slim as they climb, which makes the shaft look taller and lighter than it is. It is a textbook of classical architecture wound into a single coil.

Bramante's ramp inspired Antonio da Sangallo the Younger when he designed the double spiral of the Well of St Patrick at Orvieto. The original is usually shown only on special tours.

The staircase almost every visitor actually walks is the second one, built in 1932. Giuseppe Momo designed it as a tribute to Bramante, with sculptural work by Antonio Maraini, cast by the Ferdinando Marinelli artistic foundry. It is a true double helix: two separate spirals wind around the same shaft, one for going down and one for going up, so the two streams of people never meet. The ramps curl around the walls of a stairwell roughly fifteen metres across, beneath a canopy that lets daylight fall down the centre, and the balustrade is a band of ornately worked metal. Seen from the top, the rings of the handrail spin down to the floor like the inside of a shell.

Some architectural historians have suggested that Momo's skylit spiral influenced Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Whatever the truth of that, the modern staircase is where the museum sends visitors out, a last flourish at the end of the visit.

Getting there

The staircases are inside the Vatican Museums, whose entrance is on the north side of the Vatican walls in Rome. Metro line A stops at Cipro and at Ottaviano–San Pietro–Musei Vaticani, each a walk of under ten minutes from the entrance. The nearest airport is Rome Ciampino (CIA), about 17 km away. The modern staircase is part of the standard museum route, used as the exit; the original can be seen only on specialist tours.