Where the Vatican Goes to Hide
Published on HivePostify by @ivan-drazic · Fri Aug 07 2026
> From Castel Gandolfo’s Private Avenues to the Gardens Behind St Peter’s
For years, the Vatican existed in my mind as an extension of Rome: St Peter’s Square, the basilica and the long route through the Vatican Museums, culminating in the Sistine Chapel.
The Gallery of Maps — spectacular enough to make it easy to forget how little of the Vatican lies on the standard visitor route.
Table of contents The Papal Retreat I Knew from the Screen A Palace in the Middle of a Town The World Behind the Palace The Gardens That Briefly Became Mine Why Popes Came Here The Palace After the Gardens Two Years Later, Behind St Peter’s Less Splendour, More Mystery The Dome from the Inside A Railway Made It a Country Two Ways to Disappear Practical Notes
I knew perfectly well that it was a sovereign state, but it rarely felt like one. Its public face was too familiar, too crowded and too seamlessly attached to the city surrounding it.
What fascinated me was the part behind that public face: the roads beyond the walls, the gardens closed to casual visitors and the places where popes could withdraw from the exhausting business of being permanently visible.
I explored that hidden world through two deliberately planned visits, two years apart. The first took me to Castel Gandolfo, the small hill town outside Rome that had long intrigued me as the traditional papal retreat. The second led me through the Vatican Gardens themselves.
I had not originally conceived them as two halves of the same story, but that is what they eventually became. Castel Gandolfo revealed the Vatican as a world of retreat, privacy and monumental calm. The gardens behind St Peter’s revealed something different: a controlled internal landscape of roads, residences and infrastructure that finally made Vatican City feel like a state rather than an exceptionally elaborate part of Rome.
I had already looked into the Vatican’s green interior on an earlier visit. I simply did not yet understand what I was looking at.
I explored papal privacy on two separate trips and, with admirable spiritual consistency, stayed at a Marriott on both.
Together, the two gardens showed me where the Vatican goes when it wants to disappear.
The familiar public face of the Vatican, before entering the world behind it.
The Papal Retreat I Knew from the Screen
Castel Gandolfo had fascinated me long before I went there. For years, I had heard it mentioned in the media as the secluded place where popes withdrew from Rome. It belonged to that category of names which sound familiar even when one has only a vague idea of what they actually contain.
The 2019 drama The Two Popes gave that vague image a more tangible form. It was a film, not a documentary, but with Anthony Hopkins as Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, it transformed the papal retreat from a name in the news into a place I specifically wanted to enter.
When I planned an excursion outside Rome, Castel Gandolfo was therefore not a random choice. I wanted to see whether this repeatedly invoked papal refuge actually felt as private and remote as it appeared in the media and on screen.
The local train journey was simple. The climb from the station was not.
Lake Albano below Castel Gandolfo, before the climb to the papal retreat began.
The railway station lies well below the centre of the town, and the ascent is not a ceremonial stroll designed to prepare visitors spiritually. I walked the entire way, climbing towards the historic centre while being reminded that hill towns tend to place their best views at the direct expense of one’s lungs.
Fortunately, I already knew that the garden tour would be conducted by vehicle. After reaching the top, the thought of sitting down became unexpectedly theological.
A Palace in the Middle of a Town
My mental image of Castel Gandolfo had been wrong.
I had expected an isolated and monumental residence hidden behind walls somewhere above the lake. Instead, I arrived at the main square of a compact Italian town and found the Apostolic Palace standing almost casually among the surrounding buildings.
There was no vast ceremonial approach. The palace did not rise above the town as an inaccessible fortress. It simply formed one side of the square, integrated into a place with cafés, pedestrians and ordinary local life.
The Apostolic Palace standing directly on Castel Gandolfo���s main square.
Its public face was considerably less imposing than the Castel Gandolfo I had constructed in my imagination. Had the visit ended there, I might have left wondering why the place had acquired such a powerful reputation.
But the façade on the square was not the real story.
The world behind it was.
The World Behind the Palace
I had expected a palace with a large garden. I had no real sense of the scale of the Barberini Gardens.
The visit was conducted in a small ecological vehicle, with the historical commentary provided primarily through an audio guide. It began as a pleasant drive through immaculate grounds. Then the road continued.
Another avenue appeared, followed by another lawn, another formal arrangement of hedges and another view framed by umbrella pines. Every time I assumed that we had reached the limits of the complex, the vehicle turned and entered another part of it.
The scale begins to reveal itself beyond the palace.
Formal geometry and classical sculpture in the Barberini Gardens — the scale of Castel Gandolfo becoming harder to ignore.
The duration of the drive, more than any figure in hectares, explained how large the property really was. These were not decorative gardens arranged behind a summer residence. They formed an extensive landscape of avenues, terraces, formal parterres and open spaces, large enough for the papal world to withdraw into itself.
The contrast with the town was extraordinary. Minutes earlier, I had been standing in an ordinary square. Now I was travelling through a private landscape that seemed detached from everything outside its boundaries.
The longer the vehicle continued, the more understandable the idea of a papal retreat became.
The Gardens That Briefly Became Mine
I had booked the first tour of the morning. It was November 2021, when travel had resumed but the effects of the pandemic were still visible in visitor numbers.
I was also extraordinarily lucky.
There were no other guests on my tour. It was just me and the man driving the vehicle. The explanations came from the audio guide, but the absence of a group changed the rhythm of the experience completely.
There was no need to keep twenty people moving at the same pace. The driver could stop while I took photographs. At one point, he allowed me to step out and walk briefly through one of the formal sections. He even took photographs of me.
Outside the vehicle, with no tour group waiting to move on.
I do not pretend that this was the normal Castel Gandolfo experience. It was a combination of an early reservation, pandemic-era visitor numbers and sheer bloody luck.
For that morning, however, the gardens felt almost private.
Formal planting on a scale that only became clear during the long drive.
The strongest sensation was not grandeur but peace. Part of it was the luxury of having no one else around. But there was also something more contemplative in the long avenues, the carefully controlled silence and the complete removal from the public world.
One of the avenues that appeared to continue indefinitely.
The gardens were monumental without feeling designed primarily for spectacle. Their size created distance. Their emptiness created privacy. Together, they produced a strange combination of luxury and spiritual retreat.
For a short time, the space seemed to belong to me.
Tags: #vaticancity#castelgandolfo#vaticangardens#papalhistory#hiddenplaces