Although Saint Peter at the Vatican is more famous, the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano is officially the cathedral of Rome and the mother church of all Catholic churches, the seat of the Bishop of Rome in his role as Pope. Founded in the early fourth century by the emperor Constantine, it stands on the site of an ancient palace given to the church by his predecessors. The basilica was the principal church of the city for almost a thousand years before the papacy moved its main residence to the Vatican, and the popes lived in the adjoining Lateran Palace from the fourth century until the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, with the building serving as the centre of the western Christian church through much of its first millennium. The present building incorporates parts of the early Christian basilica but is largely the result of a major seventeenth-century rebuilding by Francesco Borromini, whose nave with its powerful piers, statues of the apostles in deep niches and elaborate coffered ceiling is one of the great spaces of the Roman baroque. The facade, by Alessandro Galilei, was added in the early eighteenth century. The basilica holds many treasures, including the reliquaries above the main altar said to contain the heads of Saints Peter and Paul, fragments of the wooden altar said to have been used by Saint Peter himself, and frescoes by Giotto and his school in scattered chapels. Beside the basilica stands the Lateran Baptistery, the prototype of all later baptisteries in the Catholic world, and across the square the Scala Sancta, a flight of marble steps brought to Rome by Saint Helena, traditionally identified with those Christ climbed in the palace of Pontius Pilate, climbed by pilgrims on their knees. The Egyptian obelisk in the square in front of the basilica, more than three thousand years old and originally from Karnak, is the tallest in Rome, having been brought to the city by the emperor Constantius II in the fourth century, and the whole complex remains one of the most concentrated sites of pilgrimage in the Catholic world.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Piazza di S. Giovanni in Laterano 4, Rome, Italy

Opening Date: 09/11/0324