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Michelangelo carved this masterpiece (see Michelangelo’s Pietà) in 1499 at the age of 25. It is at once graceful and mournful, stately and ethereal. It has been protected by glass since 1972, when a man screaming “I am Jesus Christ!” attacked it with a hammer, damaging the Virgin’s nose and fingers.

When Michelangelo designed a dome to span St Peter’s massive transept, he made it 42 m (138 ft) in diameter, in deference to the Pantheon’s 43.3-m (142-ft) dome. You can ride an elevator much of the way, but must still navigate the final 330 stairs between the dome’s inner and outer shell to the 132-m-high (435-ft) lantern and sweeping vistas across the city.

Bernini’s remarkable semi-elliptical colonnades transformed the basilica’s approach into a pair of welcoming arms embracing the faithful. Sadly, the full effect of entering the square from a warren of medieval streets was spoiled when Mussolini razed the neighbourhood to lay down pompous Via della Conciliazione. The obelisk came from Alexandria.

Whether you view it as ostentatious or glorious, Bernini’s huge altar canopy is at least impressive. Its spiralling bronze columns are claimed to have been made from the revetments (portico ceiling decorations) of the Pantheon (see Portico), taken by Pope Urban VIII. For his desecration of the ancient temple the Barberini pope and his family (see Palazzo Barberini) were castigated with the waggish quip: “What even the barbarians wouldn’t do, Barberini did.”

A holdover from the medieval St Peter’s, this 13th-century bronze statue by the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio has achieved holy status. The faithful can be seen lining up to rub (or kiss) Peter’s well-worn foot for luck.

Among the ecclesiastical treasures here is a 6th-century, jewel-encrusted bronze cross (the Crux Vaticana), various fragments of the medieval basilica including a ciborium by Donatello (1432), and Antonio Pollaiuolo’s masterful bronze slab tomb (1493) for Sixtus IV, the pope’s effigy surrounded by representations of theological virtues and liberal arts.

Bernini’s exuberantly Baroque stained-glass window (1666) centres on a dove representing the Holy Ghost, surrounded by rays of the sun and a riot of sculptural details. Beneath the window sits the Chair of St Peter (1665), another Bernini concoction; inside is a wood and ivory chair said to be the actual throne of St Peter. Bernini also crafted the multicoloured marble Monument to Urban VIII (1644) to the right, based on Michelangelo’s Medici tombs in Florence. It is of far better artistic quality than Giuglielmo della Porta’s similar one for Pope Paul III (1549) to the left.

Many of the medieval basilica’s monuments are housed beneath the basilica’s floor. During excavations in the 1940s workers discovered in the Necropolis the legendary Red Wall behind which St Peter was supposedly buried. The wall was covered with early medieval graffiti invoking the saint, and a box of bones was found behind it. The late Pope John Paul II is buried in the crypt.

One of Bernini’s last works (1678) shows figures of Justice, Truth, Chastity and Prudence gazing up at the pontiff seated in the deep shadows of the niche. A skeleton crawls from under the flowing marble drapery to hold aloft an hourglass as a reminder of mortality.

Until modern times, a church was measured by its relics. St Peter’s Basilica houses the spear of St Longinius, which jabbed Jesus’s side on the Cross, St Veronica’s handkerchief bearing Christ’s face, and a fragment of the True Cross.