Porta Santo Spirito

In 846, following the Saracen attack and the sacking of St Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo IV began the construction of a wall to protect the Vatican territory – which had been left outside the Aurelian Walls as it was not yet urbanised at the time – from future raids.

Today’s Porta Santo Spirito was one of the minor gates that opened along the walls of the fortified citadel surrounding St Peter’s tomb (the Civitas Leonina). In the 9th century, it was still referred to as “posterula Saxonum”. The Saxons referred to in its name were a people attested (alongside the Franks, the Lombards, the Frisians…) as early as the 8th century, and it is to them that we owe the foundation of the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia, situated behind the gate.

In the mid-16th century, the memory of the dramatic Sack carried out by the Landsknechts and the fear of further Turkish invasions led Pope Paul III Farnese to modernise the walls, drawing on the advice of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Michelangelo, who were constantly at odds with one another. In the area under his responsibility, Sangallo built two bastions between 1543 and 1545 (one of which was later demolished to make way for the hospital): at their center, rebuilt in monumental, classical style, the new gate was intended to serve as a grand entrance to the Vatican.

However, upon Sangallo’s death in September 1546, the construction of the gateway had not yet been completed, hampered by the conflicting objections of the two advisers. Tradition has it that a hostile Michelangelo, who took over the work, deliberately left it unfinished as it appears today: a large central arch flanked by pairs of columns and niches, perhaps originally intended to house statues of saints. Only a century later, incorporated into the new defensive system of the Gianicolense Walls alongside the nearby Porta Settimiana, the gate had in any case already outlived its defensive purpose.