Here we are waiting to go inside for the tour. We are standing in the area that is called the Piazza dei Protomartiri Romani (Square of the First Roman Martyrs) which is part of what used to be Nero's circus and is where tradition says that St. Peter was crucified.
Here we are about to enter the tour.
Here is an excerpt from George Weigel's book "Letters to a Young Catholic" that describes the Scavi tour in a very real way.
"As we enter through the Archway of the Bells, we come to the scavi office, the entrance to the excavations beneath the basilica. Scavi tours are not large affairs, and as we go down the stairways and enter the excavations themselves, you can see why. The passageways are narrow and slightly musty, even dampish. As we make our way through the dark corridors that were once streets and alleys in the Vatican Hill necropolis, our guide points out the elaborate pagan funerary monuments as well as Christian tombs. There, after about a twenty-minute walk, is what can be made out of the Tropaion. And after that, reinterred in the graffiti-marked wall I mentioned before, are what the guide tells us are the mortal remains of Peter the apostle. Leaving through the gilded baroque splendor of the Clementine Chapel, you can't help but think that what we've just seen and touched and smelled is about as close to the apostolic roots of the Catholic Church as it's possible to get." (p.24)
Let me explain some of the history we learned during the tour. In 1939 Pope Pius XI died and his tomb wouldn't fit with the other tombs underneath St. Peter's Basilica so they decided to lower the floor. When they did this, they hit the top of a mausoleum and the successor Pope Pius XII decided to explore further. This is the story of how they discovered the Scavi underneath St. Peter's.
The mausoleums used to be in the open air in ancient roman times when they were used for pagan burials. We got to see and touch a part of the original brick and tile from the ground. Christians later reused the pagan tombs for their own dead (and they know they did this by Christian symbols they found on the tombs.)
Constantine wanted to build on top of the tombs of the ancient Romans so he filled them with dirt and used them as support. There were three types of bricks, from the ancient Romans, from when Constantine filled in the tombs with earth and bricks to make a foundation to build the new St. Peter's, and bricks from the modern day when they started the excavations.
However, it is believed that Constantine knew that Christians had been buried there, as well as the belief that the tomb of St. Peter was at the center of this, because there was one mausoleum that Constantine saved and didn’t fill it with dirt because he knew it was special. (The story goes that a worker fell into a hole and instead of being pulled up right away, the people above dropped down a candle and paper and he was told to draw what he saw. He drew a picture of a fisherman, shepherd, man in chariot, and other figures that are representations of Christ, which is how they knew that it was a Christian tomb.
If I remember correctly, that was the Valeri family tomb from 323 AD. They also found an inscription saying “Peter, pray Christ Jesus for the Holy Christian men buried near your body.” This is significant because it shows that the very early Christians were praying for the dead, asking the saints to intercede for them, and that Peter’s body was buried nearby.
Peter was crucified upside down (because he said he wasn't worthy to be crucified like Jesus.) When Peter was cut off from the feet, Christians came and took his body and buried him in the hill. They put bricks around his tomb and later Constantine built a wall or box around it, and since then a few popes built altars on top of that.
As we went into each room during the tour, our guide told us more of the story. As we were nearing the end of the tour, we were lead into a small chapel. While we were there our tour guide told us that two men and a woman’s bones were found in a tomb that they believed was St. Peter's. What happened was that some early Christians had taken Peter's body out of the tomb to protect it and put his body in a secret place (meanwhile putting the other bones in the tomb.)
This is the chapel that we were in where the tomb of St. Peter was located behind the altar. What was pretty cool was that you could look all the up way and see the dome above St. Peter's Basilica. There was a room off to the side where later Peter’s bones were found with a stone reading “Peter is [within]".
However, we didn't find out the last piece of the story (about Peter's bones) until we were standing in the room, looking at something behind a gate (which we found out were the remains of Peter's bones inside a little box.) It was a very powerful moment to actually be standing there, under St. Peter's Basilica, next to the bones of Peter. Wow...
So there is a brief description of one of the most amazing things of our trip! What a blessing it was to be able to go on the Scavi tour. Not everyone who visits Rome gets to do that, since the spots are limited. If you have time, check out this website which gives you a virtual tour of the Scavi and more of the history behind it!
http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/necropoli/scavi_english.html
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