Basilica Papale di San Giovanni in Laterano

Every cathedral is the bishop's church, and the bishop of Rome's cathedral is not St Peter's but this basilica, which styles itself the mother of all churches. Founded by Constantine on imperial land beside the city walls, it kept the popes' seat for a thousand years and still holds some of Rome's most quietly astonishing spaces.

Why it matters

The Papal Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour, Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist at the Lateran is the cathedral of Rome, and by its own definition the mother and head of all the churches of the city and of the world. The Laterani family land on which it stands was confiscated under Nero and given by Constantine to the bishop of Rome after his victory at the Milvian Bridge; the first basilica was consecrated in 324. For roughly a thousand years the adjoining palace was the popes' home, and only after fire and the Avignon exile did the papacy move across the Tiber. What survives today is a composite: a Constantinian foundation, a Borromini nave, a baroque facade, and around it the oldest baptistery in Christendom, a medieval cloister and the tallest ancient obelisk on earth.

What to notice

The bronze doors of the central portal, within Alessandro Galilei's facade, were carried here in 1660 from the ancient Roman Curia in the Forum, so the Senate's own doors now open into the church. Borromini remodelled the central nave and side aisles in the seventeenth century, framing them with the deep niches that received the twelve apostle statues in the eighteenth; his architecture is at its sharpest in the rhythm of those bays. The Holy Door bears a bronze relief by Floriano Bodini, inaugurated for the Jubilee of 2000. In the piazza's north-east corner rises the red granite obelisk commissioned by Pharaoh Thutmosis III for the temple of Amun at Thebes: at 32.18 metres, or 45.70 metres with its base and cross, and some 455 tonnes, it is the tallest ancient Egyptian obelisk in the world, re-erected here by Domenico Fontana in 1588. Across the square, the octagonal Baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte holds a green basalt font urn, its surrounding frieze bearing Borromini's Chigi stars of 1657.

Context and history

The basilica was built on the same ground as Constantine's foundation of around 314, donated by the emperor to Pope Melchiades after 312 and consecrated by Pope Sylvester I in 324. Earthquakes, fire and sack marked the medieval church, and structural repairs under Eugene IV prepared the way for Francesco Borromini, who in 1650 remodelled the nave and aisles for the Jubilee. Galilei's facade closed the composition in the eighteenth century. The complex includes a cloister, a masterpiece of cosmatesque work by the Vassalletto family, filled with sculpture and fragments of the earlier basilicas, and the nearby Scala Santa, the papal sanctuary of the Holy Stairs brought, by tradition, from Pilate's praetorium. When the popes returned from Avignon in 1377 they settled at the Vatican, but the Lateran kept its rank: the bishop of Rome is enthroned here, at the cathedral seat.