Travel in Vatican City: a border in the paving and a door for every visit

Where a visitor crosses into Vatican City

The public border of Vatican City lies flat in the ground. The Governorate's own geography page describes it as a band of travertine laid across the paving between the outer ends of the colonnade, marking the limit of St Peter's Square, a square "alla quale d'ordinario si accede liberamente", to which access is ordinarily free. Wikipedia describes the same line as white, running along the edge of the square where it meets Piazza Pio XII. Beyond it is Rome. A visitor walking up Via della Conciliazione, the straight approach from near the Tiber that was built under Mussolini after the 1929 treaty, steps over the line without stopping, because there are no passport controls for anyone entering the state from the surrounding Italian territory.

That arrangement is written into the treaty. Article 3 of the Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929 placed St Peter's Square inside Vatican City and, in the same paragraph, kept it "normally open to the public" and "subject to supervision by the Italian police authorities". Those powers "shall cease to operate at the foot of the steps leading to the Basilica". The square is Vatican ground patrolled by the officers of another state, and the police authority a visitor stands under changes at a flight of steps some way inside the border line.

The same article lets the Holy See close the square for special ceremonies. On those days the Italian police withdraw beyond the outer lines of the colonnade and its extension. Wikipedia adds a detail that complicates the map further: a small strip of Italian territory, the Ricciolo d'Italia, partly encircles the square.

Everything else is enclosed. Britannica records that the medieval and Renaissance walls form the boundary on every side except the square, and Article 5 of the treaty required the Holy See to close off whatever access to the territory still stood open in 1929, the square alone excepted. A visitor enters Vatican City with no formality at all and then gets a short distance into it: the square, the basilica, and after that a series of doors that each decide who comes through.

Which Vatican doors open to the public

The two sources that count the entrances give different totals. Britannica lists six, of which three are open to the public: the square itself, the Arco delle Campane in the facade of St Peter's Basilica, and the entrance to the Vatican Museums in the north wall. The Governorate's geography page gives five, entrusts their custody to the Pontifical Swiss Guard and the Corps of Gendarmerie, and places the museum entrance on Viale Vaticano, near Piazza del Risorgimento. Neither source explains the difference, and this article records both figures.

What lies behind each door is set out in Wikipedia's account of the state, and the terms differ from one to the next:

The last row covers most of the ground. Wikipedia's geography article puts buildings on about half of the territory, and the Governorate's page on the gardens says the gardens cover about half of the 44 hectares. On the state's own figures, then, roughly half of Vatican City is garden that a visitor enters only in a small guided group.

The gardens have been kept for the pope since 1279, according to the Governorate, when Nicholas III moved the papal residence back from the Lateran to the Vatican and planted an orchard, a lawn and a garden inside the new walls he had built. The guided visits start today in the newer part of the state, laid out as large gardens after that first core.

Two of these restrictions come from the treaty and one from the Holy See's own choice. Article 18 obliged the Holy See to keep "the artistic and scientific treasures existing within the Vatican City" open "to scholars and visitors", while leaving it "free to regulate the admission of the public thereto". The museums are open by treaty; the fee, the hours and the route are the Holy See's to set.

How the Vatican Museums admit their visitors

The Vatican Museums' page on the Pio Clementino Museum traces the collection of classical sculpture to Julius II, pope from 1503 to 1513, who kept statues in what was then the Cortile delle Statue. In the second half of the 18th century the collection grew through excavations in Rome and Lazio and through gifts from collectors, and the influence of Enlightenment thinking led to "the inauguration of a museum in the modern sense, open to the public". UNESCO's inscription of 1984 describes the same step as the transformation of private papal collections into public museums "accessible to scholars and connoisseurs", and names the Pio-Clementine Museum as its milestone.

The visitor counts have risen with each source. The Wikipedia article on tourism in the state gives about 4.3 million visitors to the museums in 2007 and more than five million a year as of 2011. The Art Newspaper's annual survey, published in March 2026, recorded 6.9 million for 2025, set in its report beside the 5.3 million the Uffizi in Florence counted across its three sites. For comparison, the state's resident population on 31 December 2024 was 882.

The route through the museums ends in the Sistine Chapel, and the chapel has its own rules. Photography is banned inside, and the Holy See publishes a three-dimensional model of the interior online as a substitute. The same room is where cardinals meet in conclave, and during a papal election jamming devices are used inside it to stop pictures and information leaving by mobile phone.

Museum admissions are counted as state income. Wikipedia lists admission fees beside the sale of stamps, coins, medals, tourist mementos and publications as the sources that support the Vatican City State budget, which includes the museums and the post office. A museum ticket is therefore paid to the state itself. The economy article covers those accounts.

When the crowds come to St Peter's Square

Pilgrim numbers follow the church calendar. Wikipedia's tourism article names Christmas and Easter, the proclamation of a holy year, and the funeral and election of a pope as the moments when pilgrim numbers peak. The square and the basilica take that traffic because they are the parts of the state that anyone may enter.

The most recent holy year gives the only large recent count on file, and it is a count for Rome. On 5 January 2026 Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Holy See's organiser for the Jubilee, reported that almost 33.5 million pilgrims had come to Rome during the Holy Year of 2025, from 185 countries. The Roma Tre University had projected around 31 million. Europe supplied 62% of the pilgrims and North America 17%. The year held 35 major events. Some 5,000 volunteers served through the year, and a further 2,000 members of the Order of Malta gave first aid at the four papal basilicas. The Holy Door of St Peter's Basilica was to be closed on 6 January 2026, the formal end of the Jubilee.

The regional government of Lazio reported the medical side of the same year: emergency services carried out 580,000 interventions in 2025, 40,000 more than the year before, and emergency departments recorded 1,600,000 visits, 100,000 more than in 2024. None of the sources on file gives a count of people crossing the travertine line into the state itself, and the Jubilee figures cover the city around it.

Papal general audiences draw the other regular crowd. They are free, with tickets obtained in advance, and they are held in a hall that sits on both sides of the border. Wikipedia's geography article records that the Paul VI Audience Hall straddles the boundary between the state and Italy, and that its Italian portion has extraterritorial rights. A visitor with an audience ticket may sit in Italy and in Vatican City at once, under one roof.

How travellers reach Vatican City through Rome

Every arrival passes through Italy first. Vatican City has no airport, and its only aviation facility is the Vatican City Heliport. Article 7 of the treaty forbids aircraft of any kind to fly over the territory. Travellers land at the airports that serve Rome, Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino and, to a lesser extent, Ciampino, and cross the city to the walls.

The state does have a railway, which the treaty ordered. Article 6 required Italy to connect the Vatican to the Italian network by building a station inside the city and to let Vatican carriages run on Italian lines. The result is a standard-gauge line and a Vatican City station used mainly for freight. It joins the Italian network at Roma San Pietro station by a spur 852 metres long, of which 300 metres lie inside Vatican territory. Wikipedia records that John XXIII was the first pope to use it and that John Paul II rarely did. It carries no scheduled passenger service in any source on file, and visitors arriving by train get off at Italian stations.

The nearest metro station is Ottaviano, whose full name, Ottaviano-San Pietro-Musei Vaticani, advertises the two destinations most of its passengers want. From the river side, Via della Conciliazione leads straight to the square.

The treaty set travel terms for two groups, envoys and cardinals. Article 19 gives diplomats accredited to the Holy See, its own envoys and church dignitaries arriving from abroad "free access to the Vatican City over Italian territory without formalities", provided their passports carry the visa of a papal representative. Article 21 obliges Italy, when the papal see falls vacant, to arrange "the free transit and access of Cardinals over Italian territory to the Vatican". Everyone else arrives as a traveller in Italy and walks in.

Driving inside the walls is on the right, as in Italy, and Vatican vehicles carry the international code V. The treaty left the movement of Vatican vehicles and aircraft on and over Italian territory to later agreements between the two states.

Which papal sites lie outside the walls

The Governorate's geography page explains that the territory is too small to hold the Holy See's offices, so many of them occupy buildings in Rome, above all on Piazza Pio XII, Via della Conciliazione, Piazza San Calisto, Piazza della Cancelleria and Piazza di Spagna. Under the Lateran Treaty these buildings enjoy the immunities that international law grants to foreign embassies, and they are commonly called "zone extraterritoriali".

Counts of them vary. Wikipedia's geography article gives thirteen buildings in Rome with extraterritorial rights, plus Castel Gandolfo; Britannica gives "more than 10" buildings in Rome, plus Castel Gandolfo. The main Wikipedia article adds that the major basilicas are among these properties and that they, with Castel Gandolfo, are patrolled internally by police agents of the Vatican City State. The arrangement in St Peter's Square is the reverse, which leaves a pilgrim under Italian police on Vatican territory in the square, and under Vatican police on Italian territory inside a basilica across the city.

Castel Gandolfo lies in the Alban Hills and is the papal summer residence. It also received the Vatican Observatory. The observatory's first telescopes stood in the Vatican Gardens and near St Peter's Basilica, but light pollution made them useless for research during the 1930s, and Pius XI moved the observatory to the palace at Castel Gandolfo.

None of these properties is part of the state. They belong to the Holy See, which is a different legal person with its own sovereignty, and a visitor to any of them is in Italy under a treaty regime and outside Vatican City. The politics article sets out the difference between the two.

What Rome's weather does to a visit

The state shares Rome's climate, classified as Mediterranean, Csa, with hot, dry summers from May to September. The two Wikipedia articles on file disagree about the wet season: the main article gives mild, rainy winters from October to mid-May, the geography article from September to mid-May. The highest temperature recorded in the state was 40.8 °C, on 28 June 2022.

The territory rises to 75 metres on the Vatican Hill, a modest height a short way from the right bank of the Tiber, according to the Governorate. The public part of the visit happens largely in the open, on the paved square, and Wikipedia notes that the square produces its own small effects: mists and dews caused by the bulk of the basilica, the elevation, the fountains and the size of the paved area.

The pilgrim peaks at Christmas and Easter fall inside the wet season on either definition, and the record high of 2022 came in late June, in the dry season.

Who keeps order among the visitors

Two bodies guard the doors. The Pontifical Swiss Guard has been responsible for the personal safety of the pope since 1506, and its members, according to Wikipedia, are Catholic, unmarried Swiss men between 19 and 30 who have finished basic training in the Swiss Armed Forces. The Corps of Gendarmerie is the state's police force, charged with security, public order, border control, traffic control and criminal investigation, and it sits within a Directorate for Security Services and Civil Defence that also includes the Vatican Fire Brigade. The Governorate's geography page gives the two of them joint custody of the entrances, and Wikipedia describes both as having roles in border control between Italy and the Vatican.

Most crime in the state is committed against visitors. Wikipedia records that it consists largely of purse snatching, pickpocketing and shoplifting by outsiders, that the crowds in St Peter's Square are one of the main places for pickpockets, and that offenders caught in the square may be arrested and tried by the Italian authorities, since the Italian police patrol it. Under Article 22 of the treaty, the Holy See hands over to Italy anyone who takes refuge in Vatican City after committing an act in Italy that both states treat as a crime.

The currency is the euro, used since January 1999 under a special agreement with the European Union, with euro coins and notes in circulation from 1 January 2002; the state strikes euro coins but issues no banknotes. The working language is Italian, with Latin as the state's other language. The post is the state's own: Poste Vaticane was created on 13 February 1929, and the state issued its own stamps from 1 August that year, so a card posted inside the walls leaves through a separate postal administration.