Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 04/06/2026 16:39:00

Built in the fifth century to house the chains believed to have bound Saint Peter during his imprisonment in Jerusalem, the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli stands on the slope of the Esquiline Hill in central Rome. The chains are still kept beneath the main altar, where they are venerated on the saint feast day, but most visitors come for an entirely different reason: Michelangelo Moses. The original basilica was funded by the empress Eudoxia in 432-440 AD to house the relic and has been rebuilt and restored many times since, most extensively in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The nave preserves twenty antique columns of veined marble, possibly reused from an earlier Roman building, and an early Christian apse mosaic survives at the eastern end. Michelangelo monumental tomb for Pope Julius II occupies the right wall of the nave. Conceived as a vast freestanding structure with more than forty statues, it was reduced over decades of revisions to the surviving wall monument, an architectural composition with three superimposed levels. The central figure of Moses, carved between 1513 and 1515, sits with a long flowing beard and the horns that medieval and Renaissance tradition attached to the prophet, with the tablets of the law tucked under one arm and his head turned sharply to one side. Michelangelo himself reportedly considered it among his most successful works, and visitors have agreed for five hundred years. Beside Moses stand the figures of Leah and Rachel, gentler statues representing the active and contemplative lives, completed largely by Michelangelo workshop after the master had returned to Florence to other commissions, and the upper level shows the recumbent figure of the pope above a Virgin and Child. Reached up a steep staircase from the bustle of Via Cavour, the church is a few minutes walk from the Colosseum and is included on most thorough Roman itineraries, where the chance to stand directly in front of one of Michelangelo most famous statues, in the church for which it was made, repays the modest climb.