Scala Regia (Vatican)

Interesting facts

Bernini's Constantine was never meant for the staircase: begun in 1654, it was first planned as a free-standing statue inside St Peter's Basilica itself.

Horse and rider were carved from a single block of marble, yet Bernini only started cutting it in 1662, years after the stone arrived.

Moving the finished statue into its niche took ten days, with guards, winches, sledges, planks, straw and teams of oxen; it arrived on 12 January 1669.

Bernini was paid 7,000 scudi for the Constantine, and payment records name no other sculptor, suggesting he carved it almost entirely himself.

The billowing curtain behind the emperor is painted stucco, added because the niche was far taller than the statue it had to hold.

Daylight falling from a window above the stair was deliberately used to play the part of the miraculous light Constantine sees.

Contemporary critics grumbled that the cross was invisible to most viewers and that the emperor rides with neither saddle nor reins.

With its stucco backdrop, the Constantine monument stands about 6.4 metres high and 4.7 metres wide.

Windows open onto the landing halfway up and at the top, so each flight climbs from shadow towards light.

The stair ends at the Sala Regia, the papal reception hall that leads on to both the Sistine Chapel and the Pauline Chapel.

Why it is worth it

The Scala Regia is the ceremonial staircase of the Vatican, linking the Apostolic Palace with St Peter's Basilica, and one of the cleverest pieces of architecture of the Roman Baroque. A stair had stood here since the early sixteenth century, built by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, but when Gian Lorenzo Bernini was asked to rebuild it for Pope Alexander VII, between 1663 and 1666, he was handed an awkward strip of ground: narrow, sloping, and squeezed between the church and the palace, with walls that were not parallel but drew closer together as they climbed.

Bernini turned the problem into a masterpiece of stagecraft. He lined the stair with a barrel-vaulted colonnade whose columns diminish and draw closer as they rise, so the passage appears deeper and grander than it really is — a forced perspective of the kind usually found on a theatre stage rather than in stone. The effect draws the eye relentlessly upward, turning an ordinary climb into a procession. Over the entrance arch, sculpted angels support the coat of arms of Alexander VII, as if the pope's heraldry had just been lifted into place.

At the foot of the stair, where it meets the end of the basilica's portico, stands Bernini's equestrian statue of Constantine, finished in 1670: the emperor rears back on his horse at the moment of his vision of the cross before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, with a great stucco drapery billowing behind him. Opposite, at the other end of the portico, Agostino Cornacchini's Charlemagne of 1725 answers it. The Scala Regia is still part of the ceremonial entrance to the Vatican, reached from St Peter's Square through the Bronze Door.

Getting there

The staircase is inside the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, at the northern end of the portico of St Peter's Basilica. Most visitors glimpse it and the statue of Constantine from the portico itself; the stair proper is not part of general visits. Rome's Ciampino airport (CIA) is about 16 km away, and Fiumicino is the main international gateway.

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Scala Regia (Vatican)

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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