The papal apartment in Vatican City, despite being one of the most historically significant private residences on Earth with 10 rooms, frescoed ceilings, and priceless artwork, reveals profound contradictions in how Popes actually lived: it features a bedroom door with no lock by design for accessibility, a private chapel where one Pope spent 2-3 hours daily in prostrate prayer, a rooftop swimming pool installed for medical rehabilitation, a housekeeper who ran the household for 41 years and was asked to leave within hours of her employer's death, and a bathroom renovation that became an international financial scandal, demonstrating that even the most powerful religious figure in the world lives in remarkably human, often contradictory conditions.
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Have you ever wondered what's really going on inside the Pope's private rooms? The answers range from surprisingly bleak to genuinely bizarre.
Vatican City may look like a palace of gold and prayer from the outside, but step through the right doors and you'll find a place where one Pope kept 20,000 books and another refused to eat. A room that technically had a death penalty attached to it.
A housekeeper who ran the most powerful private residence in Catholicism for 41 years >> [music] >> and then got asked to leave within hours of her employer's death. And a bathroom renovation that somehow became an international financial scandal.
Let's count down 15 weird facts about the Pope's private quarters that most people have never heard. The current [music] Pope refuses to live there. The papal apartment sits on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace. 10 rooms, frescoed ceilings, original marble floors, a private chapel, a formal library, a dining room, staff quarters, [music] and a direct view over Street Peter's Square that painters have been trying to capture for five centuries. Every Pope for over a hundred years called it home.
It is by any measure one of the most historically significant private residences on Earth. Pope Francis looked at it and said no. [music] Within days of his election in March 2013, he moved into room 201 of the Santa Marta guesthouse, a modest hotel-style suite inside Vatican City where visiting clergy, Vatican officials, and church delegates [music] also stay. The room has a single bed, a small desk, a plain wooden crucifix on the wall, and no [music] frescos whatsoever. He called the apartment too big and said he needed to live around people. He couldn't function, he explained, [music] in isolation.
Vatican staff reportedly needed weeks to fully process this. The papal apartment had its own dedicated household team cooks, cleaners, a master of ceremonies, all of whom suddenly found their primary purpose redirected. Francis began eating his meals in the Santa Marta communal dining room, sitting at regular tables with whoever else was staying there that week. Bishops on Vatican business, visiting theologians, the occasional cardinal, all of them eating pasta a few seats down from the Pope. He still lives there today.
More than a decade into his papacy, >> [music] >> the most important apartment in Catholicism sits largely empty, cleaned regularly, maintained carefully, and waiting for an occupant who has made very clear he isn't coming. One Pope filled it with 20,000 books and ran out of room.
Pope Benedict the 16th was elected in April 2005, moved into the papal apartment, [music] and immediately began the process of making it look like the world's most serious private library had been dropped into a Renaissance palace.
He had roughly 20,000 books shipped from his former Munich residence volumes, accumulated over decades as a theologian, professor, archbishop, and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
>> [music] >> Theology, scripture, philosophy, church history, patristics, languages.
The apartment's [music] bookshelves, already substantial for a private residence, were simply not enough.
Crates of books began occupying secondary rooms. The overflow was not a temporary situation. It [music] was the permanent condition of the apartment throughout his entire papacy. His housekeeper, a member of the Memores Domini lay community who managed the household, >> [music] >> reportedly said that dusting around the theology section alone took a full morning. Not the whole apartment, just the theology. Benedict also brought his personal Steinway upright piano and had it installed in the apartment's private rooms. He played most evenings, usually Mozart, [music] occasionally Bach, and Vatican insiders said that on quiet nights, you could hear the music [music] drifting through the corridors of the Apostolic Palace.
He reportedly told his long-time personal secretary, Archbishop Gänswein, [music] that the piano was not a luxury, but a necessity, something non-negotiable, essential to his ability to function. It is, to the knowledge of most Vatican historians, [music] the only documented instance of a pope formally classifying a musical instrument as essential papal equipment.
The books and the piano left with him when he resigned in 2013. The apartment went silent. The papal bedroom has no lock on the door. Here is something that has quietly unsettled every newly elected pope in modern history, according to multiple papal biographers.
The private bedroom in the papal apartment >> [music] >> has no lock. Not a broken lock. Not a lock that was removed for renovation and never replaced. [music] No lock. By design. The logic is theological and institutional, rather than reckless. The pope must be accessible at all times, including at night. In the event of a global crisis, a death in the College of Cardinals, >> [music] >> an urgent communication from a head of state, or any number of emergencies that apparently cannot wait until morning, the papal household staff need the ability to reach him.
In practice, the bedroom is protected by layers of protocol, a rotating household team. Pontifical staff with scheduled access.
>> [music] >> Swiss Guards controlling the wider building. Nobody is wandering in. But the door itself doesn't lock. That distinction, apparently, that matters enormously to the person sleeping behind it. Multiple accounts from cardinals and papal biographers describe this as one of the details that hit newly elected popes hardest in their first nights in the apartment. Not the ceremonies, not the crowds, not the theological weight of the office. The bedroom door. The fact that it doesn't lock. Several popes have reportedly lain awake on their first night thinking about precisely that, which is either a very human response to an unusual situation, >> [music] >> or a very telling commentary on what the papacy actually feels like from the inside. A pope once had a rooftop swimming pool, and the Vatican tried to keep it quiet.
>> [music] >> On the 13th of May 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot twice in St. Peter's Square by Mehmet Ali Ağca.
He survived, but the wounds were serious damage to his colon, [music] small intestine, and left hand, and his recovery was long and difficult. As part of his physical rehabilitation, Vatican doctors recommended regular low-impact exercise.
>> [music] >> The solution they landed on was a small swimming pool installed on the rooftop terrace of the Apostolic Palace. This made John Paul II the first Pope in modern history to have a rooftop swimming pool inside Vatican City.
The Vatican's initial approach to this fact was to not discuss it.
>> [music] >> There were concerns, not unreasonable ones, about how a papal swimming pool would be received by a global church that included hundreds of millions of people living in poverty. A journalist broke the story regardless.
The Vatican's eventual public response was measured. The pool existed. [music] It was medically recommended, and that was essentially that.
John Paul II used it regularly for years.
He was already an unusually physically [music] active Pope. He had been a keen skier and hiker before his election, and the pool fit naturally into a morning routine that began at 5:30 a.m. and included swimming before prayer. Or prayer before swimming, depending on the account. The rooftop of the Apostolic Palace became, for a significant portion of his papacy, [music] a genuine athletic facility. The pool is no longer in active use, but it's still up there. The private chapel floor is where [music] the Pope actually worked before anyone else was awake. The papal apartment includes a private chapel, a small, ornate room used exclusively by the Pope for personal prayer, daily mass, and private devotion. It is not open to visitors, >> [music] >> does not appear on Vatican tours, and by all accounts, looks more like a serious working room than a ceremonial space.
>> [music] >> For John Paul II, it was the most important room in the building.
His daily routine during his papacy, documented extensively by his personal secretaries and household staff, [music] began before 6:00 a.m. He would rise, enter the chapel, and spend the next two to three hours in prayer. Not seated prayer, not kneeling prayer, prostrate prayer. Lying completely flat on the floor, face down, for hours.
Every single morning, without exception, for the entirety of his two six-year papacy, his personal secretaries learned the rule immediately.
The chapel door was not to be knocked on before 8:00 a.m. under any circumstances.
>> [music] >> If something urgent arrived, and things arrived constantly, because he was the Pope, it went under the door. Cardinals with pressing matters sat in the corridor and waited. Heads of state were told the Holy Father was unavailable.
>> [music] >> The most powerful religious figure in the world was on the floor of a small Vatican room and was not to be disturbed. The chapel's kneelers reportedly showed visible wear within the first few years of his papacy. The floor itself, by multiple accounts, showed the same. One Pope found the apartment so lonely, he moved his whole family.
In next door, Pope John XXIII was elected in October 1958 at the age of 76. He was warm, funny, deeply unpretentious, >> [music] >> and famously communal a man who had spent his life surrounded by people and found genuine pleasure in ordinary [music] company.
He came from a large farming family in Sotto il Monte, >> [music] >> a small village near Bergamo in northern Italy. He had 12 siblings.
Meal times in his childhood home were not quiet occasions. The papal apartment was very quiet. He told his personal secretary, Loris Capovilla, within his first week, that he felt like a ball >> [music] >> that had been thrown into a corner and forgotten.
The phrase stuck.
It was repeated in memoirs, biographies, and accounts of his early papacy, a remarkably honest admission from a man who had just been handed the leadership of the world's largest religious institution.
His response was practical and entirely characteristic. He began inviting members of his extended family, brothers, nephews, [music] nieces, to stay in Vatican guest houses nearby, so he could see familiar faces at mealtimes and in the evenings.
Vatican staff, who were accustomed to the considerably more formal household of his predecessor, Pius XII, found the adjustment significant. The Pope's brother showing up for dinner was not a scenario the pontifical household had previously planned for. John XXIII did not particularly care about the adjustment required.
>> [music] >> He wanted people around him and made arrangements accordingly. He went on to call the Second Vatican Council, >> [music] >> one of the most consequential events in modern church history. He did it surrounded by family whenever possible.
The apartment's housekeeper ran it for 41 years. Then got asked to leave within hours. Sister Pascalina Lennert was a Bavarian nun of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who first entered the service of Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, in 1917, when he was the Vatican's apostolic nuncio in Munich.
She was 23.
She managed his household in Munich, then in Berlin, then in Rome, as he rose through the Vatican hierarchy to become Cardinal Secretary of State, and eventually Pope in 1939.
She ran the papal apartment for the entirety of his papacy, 19 [music] years, and had effectively run his private household for 41 years total by the time he died in 1958.
She managed his schedule, oversaw his staff, controlled access to the apartment, and was by every account the person who knew Pius XII's daily life most intimately. Vatican insiders called her la papessa, the female [music] Pope.
It was not entirely meant as a compliment, but it was entirely accurate as a description of her influence over the most private operations of the papal household.
>> [music] >> When Pius XII died on the 9th of October, 1958, Sister Pascalina was asked to vacate the apartment within hours. The transition of a papacy is immediate and institutional, and the apartment needed to be prepared for its next occupant.
Decades of [music] service, hours to leave. She moved to a convent in Rome and eventually to the North American College, where she lived until her death >> [music] >> in 1983.
She wrote a memoir published in German in 1982 under the title "Ich durfte ihm dienen" "I was permitted to serve him." It offered the most intimate account of daily life inside the papal apartment ever committed to print. The Vatican did not officially endorse it. It became a primary historical source anyway.
>> [music] >> One pope ate almost nothing and his housekeeper's main job was convincing him to try Pius XII's relationship with food inside the papal apartment is, by all documented accounts, one of the stranger aspects of his papacy.
>> [music] >> His meals were meager in a way that concerned everyone around him. A piece of toast, a small bowl of broth, >> [music] >> occasionally a soft-boiled egg, rarely anything more substantial. Sister Pascalina later wrote in her memoir that she spent considerably more energy and creativity [music] trying to persuade him to eat something, anything, than she spent actually preparing food. Elaborate arguments, careful presentations, nutritional reasoning.
He remained largely indifferent. He was, throughout his papacy, extremely thin.
He wore the same pair of glasses for so long that they eventually fell apart on his face and had to be repaired rather than replaced.
His shoes were resoled repeatedly rather than replaced with new ones.
>> [music] >> He lived in one of the most ornate private residences in human history, original Renaissance frescoes, marble floors, priceless artwork on every wall, and ate like someone who had genuinely forgotten that meals were supposed to be a regular event. He also kept a German Shepherd named Gretl in the apartment.
Gretl was, by multiple accounts, a constant presence in the papal private rooms. She reportedly napped under his desk during private audiences, accompanied him on walks through the Vatican Gardens, >> [music] >> and was a source of visible, uncomplicated affection in an otherwise intensely formal life.
When Gretl died, Pius XII wept openly.
Not quietly, not privately, openly.
His staff, who had watched him maintain extraordinary composure through 19 years of some of the most difficult events in modern history, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, described it as one of the most startling things they had ever witnessed.
A German Shepherd brought the controlled, ascetic, [music] famously reserved Pius XII to visible tears.
The broth did not. The toast did not.
The dog did. The windows were sealed shut for 25 years because of one Pope's lifelong phobia. Pope Leo XIII was elected in 1878 at the age of 67 and served until 1903, dying at 93, one of the oldest Popes in history, and one of the longest-serving. He was intellectually formidable, politically engaged, and responsible for some of the most significant social teaching documents in Catholic history.
He was also, by all contemporary accounts, absolutely convinced that drafts would kill him. Not a mild discomfort, not a preference for warm rooms, a genuine, lifelong, deeply held belief that cold air moving through a space was a serious and present threat to his health and survival.
He had the apartment's tall windows fitted with additional insulating panels during winter months. He issued standing instructions to household staff that no window in the private rooms was to be opened [music] without his explicit prior permission.
In any season, for any reason.
Visitors to the apartment during the summer months described it as suffocatingly warm.
Leo XIII considered it comfortable.
Staff members who accidentally left a window ajar even briefly, even in summer, [music] even in rooms Leo wasn't currently occupying, were dealt with firmly. This was not a policy that relaxed over time or softened as his papacy continued.
It remained in effect for the full 25 years of his pontificate. That is a quarter of a century during which no one who worked in the papal apartment could open a window without asking the Pope first. As workplace conditions go, it is unusual. The receiving room has a chair that's always slightly higher than everyone else's.
The papal private library, known formally as >> [music] >> the Studio Privado, is the room in the apartment where the Pope conducts private one-on-one meetings. Heads of state, religious leaders, senior cardinals, diplomats, theologians receiving an audience.
This is the room where history gets made quietly, without cameras, in a setting that looks like a very serious private study.
The chair arrangement in this room is not accidental and has never been accidental.
>> [music] >> By centuries-old Vatican protocol, the Pope's chair is positioned slightly higher than the chair offered to guests.
Not dramatically, not a throne on a dais while visitors sit on the floor.
Subtly, [music] just enough.
A spatial encoding of hierarchy that has been maintained through dozens of papacies and [music] thousands of audiences without needing to be explained to anyone who sits down in it.
When Pope John Paul I was elected [music] in August 1978, shown the Studio Privado for the first time, he looked at the chair arrangement and asked for the papal throne-style chair to be removed and replaced with a regular armchair, something his guests would also recognizably be sitting in.
He said he found the existing [music] arrangement somewhat theatrical. The request was carried out.
John Paul I died 33 days into [music] his papacy, the shortest pontificate in modern history.
His armchair was still in the Studio Privado when John Paul II arrived to begin his own papacy weeks later.
Whether John Paul II kept it or reinstated the elevated chair depends on which account you read.
What's not disputed is the armchair [music] or the 33 days.
A bathroom renovation in the apartment became an international scandal when Pope Francis declined to move into the papal apartment in 2013, the building didn't stop accumulating costs. The Apostolic Palace requires ongoing maintenance, security, staffing, and periodic renovation. A building of its age and complexity filled with irreplaceable artwork and infrastructure centuries old doesn't maintain itself.
Funds continue to flow through Vatican accounts for its upkeep, regardless of whether a pope is sleeping there. In the course of broader Vatican financial reforms, reforms that Francis himself championed and that resulted [music] in significant institutional restructuring, Vatican auditors and investigators began reviewing historical spending across multiple departments. What emerged, across several years of reporting and official investigations, was a picture of spending on Apostolic Palace renovations >> [music] >> that was poorly documented, inconsistently approved, and in several cases significantly over budget. A reported multi-million euro renovation of bathroom facilities became one of the specific line items that attracted scrutiny. To be clear about the context, >> [music] >> the Apostolic Palace contains bathrooms that are themselves historic.
In a building full of art that cannot be touched with ordinary cleaning products, maintained by staff operating under extraordinary security constraints, renovation in that environment is genuinely complicated and genuinely expensive. None of that made the headlines any easier. In a building full of Raphael frescoes and 16th century marble, the paperwork around a bathroom refurbishment >> [music] >> became a symbol of everything the Vatican's financial reform process was trying to fix.
The finances of the Holy See are considerably more complicated than its ceilings and considerably harder to explain.
>> [music] >> The apartment technically had a death penalty attached to it until 1969 Vatican [music] City retained capital punishment as a legal provision until 1969. The specific crime most directly connected to the papal residence and to the person living in it was attempting to assassinate the Pope. Under Vatican law, as it stood for much of the 20th century, a successful or attempted attack on the Pope's life was a capital offense.
The penalty was death. It was never carried out under Vatican jurisdiction in the modern era.
But it was a live legal provision sitting on the books through two world wars, the Cold [music] War, and most of the post-war papacies. When Mehmet Ali Ağca shot Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on the 13th of May, 1981, the assassination attempt that led to [music] the rooftop pool discussed earlier, he was arrested, tried, and convicted under Italian law, not Vatican law.
Partly because the shooting occurred in the square, which has complicated jurisdictional status, and partly because the Vatican had removed the death penalty from its statutes 12 years earlier in 1969 under Pope Paul VI. John Paul II later visited Ağca in his Italian prison cell in 1983.
>> [music] >> He sat with him privately for approximately 20 minutes.
He forgave him personally and shook his hand.
He later advocated for Ağca's release, which eventually occurred in 2000.
Ağca subsequently converted to Catholicism and has made several public statements about his relationship with the church.
That entire sequence, the shooting, the survival, the prison visit, the personal forgiveness, >> [music] >> the advocacy for release, the conversion would have been legally and practically impossible under Vatican law as it stood before 1969.
The death penalty on the books wasn't theoretical.
Removing it changed what was possible.
The private gardens are tended by the same families across generations.
Immediately below and around the Apostolic Palace lie the Vatican Gardens, roughly 23 hectares of grounds that include formal Italian gardens, >> [music] >> wooded areas, fountains, a replica of the Lourdes Grotto, a helipad, and the private rooftop terrace garden associated with the papal apartment above. These gardens have been continuously cultivated and maintained [music] since the 15th century, making them one of the longest continually tended private grounds in Europe. They are maintained by a remarkably small, stable workforce, one that has historically included family lines passing garden responsibilities between generations. Fathers to sons, aunts [music] to nephews.
A workforce small enough that individual relationships with the papal household became [music] personal over decades.
The rules governing work near the papal windows are specific. [music] Silence protocols apply during certain hours. Particular paths are cleared before the Pope uses them. Tools that make significant noise >> [music] >> are scheduled away from times when the apartment is occupied in the morning.
John Paul II was known to walk the garden paths late at night, sometimes after 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. alone, without staff accompanying him. This meant garden workers needed to ensure paths were clear, gates were accessible, and nothing was left out that would disrupt or interrupt a papal walk without him being aware that preparations had been made.
A nighttime papal garden walk needed to feel spontaneous, even when it wasn't.
Quietly maintaining a garden in the dark so the Pope can feel alone in it is an unusual professional skill. The families who've held these positions for generations presumably develop a sense of it.
Everything in the apartment belongs to the church, not the Pope. This is the fact that makes the previous 13 feel different when you consider it. For all the intimacy of living inside the papal apartment, choosing which books to bring, [music] installing a piano, sealing the windows, keeping a dog, lying on the chapel floor every morning, none of it is the Pope's. Not legally, not institutionally.
Every furnishing in the Apostolic Palace, every artwork hanging on its walls, every fixture and fitting [music] and carpet and candlestick belongs to the Holy See as an institution. The Pope is its most prominent [music] occupant.
He is not its owner. He doesn't own any of it. He never does.
When a Pope dies, the apartment is cleared and prepared for the conclave process and then for the next occupant.
When Benedict the 16th resigned in February 2013, the first Pope [music] to do so in nearly 600 years, he departed the apartment and moved to the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, a small residence inside Vatican City that had been prepared for him.
He took his 20,000 books.
He took his Steinway piano.
The things he brought were his.
The apartment itself and everything in it that had been there before him passed immediately back to the institution. The apartment was then available for Pope Francis, who, as we've established, declined it and moved into a guest house room with an alarm clock on the nightstand.
The most historically significant private residence in the Catholic world has therefore been sitting furnished, professionally cleaned, carefully maintained, >> [music] >> and essentially unoccupied since the spring of 2013, waiting for a Pope who has shown, over more than a decade, >> [music] >> absolutely no inclination to move in.
One Pope stood at the window watching the empty square at 2:00 a.m. every night. Pope Paul VI led the Catholic Church from 1963 to 1978, 15 years that included the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, the social upheaval of the 1960s, >> [music] >> the publication of Humanae Vitae, and the slow, grinding experience of watching an institution he loved fracture along fault lines he had helped create or failed to close or both. It was, by most historical accounts, an extraordinarily [music] difficult pontificate for the man living through it. He had a habit.
>> [music] >> Late at night, after the day's work was finished and the apartment had gone quiet, he would go to the window overlooking St. Peter's Square [music] and stand there. Not briefly, not a glance before bed.
He would stand at the window for 20 or 30 minutes at a stretch, sometimes longer, watching the square empty out as the night deepened.
>> [music] >> The tourists gone, the pilgrims gone, the vendors and the tour guides and the photographers gone.
Just the square, the obelisk, the colonnades, and whatever light the Vatican kept burning at that hour.
He told a visiting cardinal on one occasion that 2:00 a.m. was the only time Rome was truly quiet. [music] Paul VI was a man of enormous intellectual complexity and by most accounts, significant personal loneliness. A leader who felt the weight of every decision he made and carried it without much visible relief. There is something in that image that resists easy commentary.
A pope alone in a palace standing at a window in the middle of the night looking down at an empty square [music] in one of the world's great cities watching the pigeons.
As far as anyone recorded, not reading, not working, just standing there in the dark, in the quiet, looking out. It is the most human portrait the papal apartment has ever produced.
What becomes clear when you look at the pope's private quarters, really look at them, across the centuries [music] and the personalities and the habits and the strange institutional rules is just how profoundly contradictory that space is.
It is one of the most magnificent private residences in human history and it is also a place where a pope couldn't open a window.
Where another pope lay on the floor for 3 hours before breakfast.
>> [music] >> Where a housekeeper ran everything for 41 years and was asked to leave within hours of her employer's death. Where a bedroom door has no lock and apparently never has. And where the current occupant took one look [music] and moved into a guest house instead.
A room full of 20,000 books and a Steinway piano.
>> [music] >> A rooftop pool that wasn't supposed to be public knowledge.
A chair that's always slightly higher than everyone else's. A bathroom renovation that became an [music] international scandal.
And a window that one Pope stood at alone.
At 2:00 in the morning.
>> [music] >> Just watching the city go quiet. For all the marble and the frescos and the 2,000 years of sacred authority when it comes to how Popes actually live behind those closed doors.
They are remarkably unmistakably, almost painfully human.
Which of these surprised you the most?
Let us know in the comments.
Thank you so much for watching.
>> [music] >> And please like and subscribe to see more like this.
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