Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore Site Features

The fifth-century nave and arch mosaics

Scenes from the life of the Virgin and of Christ, with Old Testament subjects including Moses striking the Red Sea and the Egyptians drowning in it. Of the 430s, contemporary with the walls, and read as milestones in the depiction of the Virgin. They are small and high — bring a zoom.

Torriti's apse mosaic

The Coronation of the Virgin, 1295, signed by the Franciscan friar Jacopo Torriti. It closes the view east and is eight and a half centuries younger than the nave above which it sits.

The tomb of Pope Francis

In the side nave between the Sforza Chapel and the Pauline Chapel, since 2025. He chose this basilica over St Peter's, and the placement is deliberately modest.

The Salus Populi Romani

The venerated image of the Madonna and Child taken as patroness and protectress of the Roman people, granted a pontifical decree of canonical coronation by Gregory XVI in the bull Cælestis Regina Maxima of 15 August 1838.

The Sistine Chapel of Sixtus V

Domenico Fontana's chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the right transept — not the Vatican's, which is Sixtus IV's. It holds the tombs of Sixtus V and of his early patron Pius V, and four gilded bronze angels by Sebastiano Torregiani supporting a ciborium modelled on the chapel itself. Beneath the altar is the Oratory of the Nativity, where Ignatius of Loyola celebrated his first Mass as a priest on 25 December 1538.

Bernini's grave

Just outside that chapel lies the tomb of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his family — the architect of half of Baroque Rome, buried without ceremony in a side aisle.

Arnolfo di Cambio's nativity, 1291

In the museum: the first nativity scene in the history of art, a marble group shown in a case that can be walked around and viewed from every side. Beside it, the so-called Chasuble of Saint Jerome, a very rare surviving medieval liturgical vestment.

The gilded ceiling and the campanile

Sangallo's sixteenth-century coffered ceiling overhead, and outside the fourteenth-century bell tower — at roughly 75 metres, the tallest in Rome.