NEWS FEATURE: Pope Inaugurates New $23 Million Entrance to Vatican Museums

c. 2000 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ Inaugurating a new $23 million entrance to the Vatican Museums, Pope John Paul II said Monday (Feb. 7) the high-tech facility built into the museums’ 16th century walls symbolizes the church’s renewed desire for dialogue with humanity “under the sign of art and culture.” The main purpose […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Inaugurating a new $23 million entrance to the Vatican Museums, Pope John Paul II said Monday (Feb. 7) the high-tech facility built into the museums’ 16th century walls symbolizes the church’s renewed desire for dialogue with humanity “under the sign of art and culture.”

The main purpose of the four-floor complex is to do away with the long lines that presently form outside the Vatican Walls, speed up the processing of visitors and ease their flow through the Vatican’s extensive collections. It also provides restaurants, cloakrooms, a first aid station, a nursery, shops and a terrace with a view of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.


The new entrance will open to the public later this month after an exhaustive, final check of the building and its facilities, museum officials said.

“The value is not only functional but is symbolic of a more fitting entrance, that is to say more welcoming, to express the renewed will of the church for dialogue with humanity under the sign of art and culture, placing at the disposal of all the patrimony entrusted to it by history,” the Roman Catholic pontiff said.

“When, at the end of the 18th century, Popes Clemente XIV and Pius VI founded the Vatican Museums in the modern sense of the term, visitors were a very restricted elite.

“Today, they are thousands a day, from every social and cultural extraction and coming from every part of the world,” he said. “Truly, one can say that the museums constitute, on the cultural plane, one of the Holy See’s most significant doors open on the world.”

Francesco Buranelli, director general of the museums, noted at a press preview Friday (Feb. 4) that museum rules written in 1857 specified that “the number of individuals who will be admitted to study in the gallery can never exceed 10.”

Buranelli said 3 million people visited the museums last year, double the 1.5 million of 20 years earlier. He said there are up to 20,000 visitors a day at peak periods of the year.

Because of the expected additional increase in numbers during Holy Year celebrations, the Vatican has extended the museums’ weekday closing time to 4:45 p.m. and is allowing groups totaling 2,000 people to visit the Sistine Chapel between 8 and 8:45 a.m., the normal opening hour.


Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the former archbishop of Detroit who serves as president of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City, said the Vatican paid the entire $23 million cost of the project from its own funds.

Building the new entrance took three years. It involved cutting through a section of the high brick walls that surround the Vatican city-state and removing about 40,000 square meters of earth from the steep hillside just inside.

Massimo Stoppa, director general of technical services for the Vatican and head of the team of architects and engineers that designed and built the entrance, said the engineering problems were formidable because of the terrain and the site’s close proximity to centuries-old structures.

Visitors enter the spacious new building through tall bronze doors showing scenes of the Creation by sculptor Cecco Bonanotte. Near the doors stands a large white marble sculpture by Giuliano Vangi called “Crossing the Threshold”; it depicts John Paul encouraging a youth to stride forward.

The central atrium, lit by the glass and metal roof of the top floor, is constructed mainly of local materials _ white travertine, dark gray basalt, wood and ceramics. On the top floor, what once were exterior walls of brick and stucco have been incorporated in the interior.

Visitors buy tickets, check their coats and go through airport-style security controls on the first two floors.


A broad white marble ramp, in the flattened-spiral shape of a helicoid, and eight elevators carry visitors from the second floor to temporary exhibition and meeting space on the third floor and to the fourth floor where they enter the museum proper. A cafeteria, self-service restaurant, pizzeria and terrace are also reached from the top floor.

The old entrance, built in 1932, will now serve only as a exit, allowing a one-way traffic plan.

Buranelli said that a network of telecameras and a radio communication system will enable museum directors to constantly track the flow of visitors and communicate with guards.

“It is a system comparable to one that handles the traffic of a city of 10,000 inhabitants,” he said.

DEA END RNS

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