15 Hidden Objects That Only a Few People Have Ever Seen

[00:00:00]Of the roughly 6 million people who walk through the Vatican Museums every year, almost all of them take the same route.

[00:00:05]They enter through the main gates, follow the red arrows along corridors 100 m long, pass through the Gallery of Maps, move through the Raphael rooms, and emerge into the Sistine Chapel.

[00:00:16]>> [music] >> They see extraordinary things, genuinely extraordinary things. And they walk past without knowing >> [music] >> some of the most unusual objects in the institution past closed doors past unmarked corridors past a tower that directly above their heads in the Gallery of Maps and that contains the room where the calendar we all use was [music] proven to be necessary. They walk past a small chapel whose ceiling stars were painted by the same hand that painted the Annunciation in Florence. A chapel that sees a few thousand visitors a year while the Sistine Chapel above it sees 6 million. This script is about the things on the other side of the closed door, not the things behind locked vaults or sealed archives. We've examined those extensively elsewhere in this series.

[00:01:00]But the things that exist in the same buildings millions of people enter every year, in the same walls tourists lean against to check their phones, in the same quarters museum staff walk past every morning on their way to work, >> [music] >> and that almost no one has ever stood in front of and seen. Some of these objects require special tours.

[00:01:17]>> [music] >> Some require specific scholarly credentials. Some are in rooms that aren't on any map >> [music] >> and never have been. And at least one is, with considerable architectural certainty, somewhere in the Vatican right now, significant, possibly extraordinary, simply waiting for someone to find it. These are 15 hidden objects that only a few people have ever seen. 01, the Meridian Room in the Tower of Winds, the room that changed every calendar on Earth, above the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums. The spectacular 120 m corridor, whose painted walls have been admired by millions of visitors, rises a a stone tower that most of those same visitors walk beneath without ever noticing. It sits directly above their heads, unreachable through any door on the standard museum route, accessible to essentially no one >> [music] >> without a specific appointment or a remarkable piece of luck.

[00:02:10]This is the Torre dei Venti, the Tower of Winds, >> [music] >> and inside it, in a room that almost no living person has ever entered, is an object whose significance to every human being alive is almost impossible to overstate.

[00:02:23]The meridian line that proved our calendar was wrong and [music] gave birth to the calendar we still use today. In 1578, Pope Gregory XIII commissioned the Bolognese architect Ottaviano Mascarino to build a tower equipped, in the words of a papal decree, with the greatest and best instruments of the time. Specifically for the purpose of proving or disproving a hypothesis that the astronomers advising him had been advancing.

[00:02:46]>> [music] >> That the Julian calendar in use since 45 BC had accumulated so many inaccuracies over 16 centuries that the date of the spring equinox had drifted 10 full days from where the calendar said it should fall. The proof mechanism was a pinhole in the south wall of the tower's main room, positioned precisely so that at solar noon on any given day, a shaft of sunlight would fall through it and land on a marble strip set into the floor.

[00:03:13]The mathematician and Dominican friar Ignazio Danti placed the hole in the mouth of a painted figure representing the south wind, a touch of elegance that makes the [music] room, even to a casual visitor's eye, something more than pure scientific apparatus.

[00:03:28]>> [music] >> On the spring equinox, if the calendar were accurate, the light would fall on the equinox marker.

[00:03:34]>> [music] >> When the test was first conducted in 1582, the light fell 10 days early, landing on March 11th rather than March 21st. [music] The hypothesis was confirmed. The calendar was wrong. The result was the Gregorian calendar reform of 1,000 582. [music] 10 days were simply deleted from October. Of that year, October 4th was followed immediately by October 15th, and the leap year calculation was adjusted to prevent the drift from recurring. Every country on Earth now uses the Gregorian calendar.

[00:04:05]Every date on every document signed today >> [music] >> traces its accuracy back to the measurement made in this room.

[00:04:11]And the room itself, the pinhole still in the wall, the marble meridian line still in the floor, the Brill brothers 16th-century frescoes still vivid on the plaster, sits above the gallery of maps, locked and inaccessible, visited by almost no one.

[00:04:27]A travel writer named Tiffany Parks recorded a visit she made to the tower in 2008, permitted by a Vatican guard who was a personal friend.

[00:04:36]She described it as an incredible experience, especially knowing that so few people have ever had a chance to see it.

[00:04:44]The tower has not been open to public visits in any meaningful sense since the Vatican Observatory relocated out of it in the 1930s.

[00:04:52]Today, millions of people consult the calendar the room created every single day of their lives and have no idea the room exists. Zero two, the cabinet of masks and the chair that tested whether Popes were men.

[00:05:06]Hidden in a section of the Pio-Clementine Museum that is explicitly closed to ordinary visitors on a standard museum ticket, accessible only through a specifically arranged private guided tour, is a small square room that tour guides describe, with considerable justification, as perhaps the most surprising space in the entire Vatican Museums complex.

[00:05:26]Its official name is the Gabinetto delle Maschere, the cabinet of masks, and it contains two objects that, >> [music] >> set side by side, capture something genuinely strange about the range of things the Vatican chooses to preserve.

[00:05:39]>> [music] >> The first is the floor itself, a mosaic of extraordinary refinement, originally laid in the villa of Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli [music] in the 2nd century AD and transported to the Vatican in the late 18th century >> [music] >> depicting theatrical masks in a style art historians call opus vermiculatum tiny tesserae [music] arranged with the fluid almost organic curves of vermicula of worms so small and so precisely [music] placed that from a distance the mosaic reads as a painted image. The masks include both comedic and tragic faces their expressions ranging from grotesque amusement to something close to anguish. The full emotional register of ancient Roman theater rendered in stone so fine that the work [music] could not be replicated by modern craftsmanship at any cost. The second object is considerably stranger sitting in a corner of the room is a stone chair with [music] a conspicuous gap cut into its seat an aperture that gives the object its formal name the sedes stercoraria literally [music] the dung chair or hole chair and that connects it to one of the most persistent and colorful legends in all of Vatican history.

[00:06:47]According to this legend which circulated widely in the medieval period [music] the Catholic Church was briefly led in the 9th century by a woman named Joan who disguised herself as a man >> [music] >> was elected Pope and was only discovered when she unexpectedly gave birth during a papal procession. Whatever the historical reality modern historians are divided on whether Pope Joan existed at all the chair with the hole was supposedly [music] used in later centuries to verify the gender of newly elected Popes with a cardinal reaching up beneath it to confirm by the most direct method imaginable that the new pontiff was biologically male. Whether the chair was actually used in this manner or whether it's opening served some other more mundane function remains a question historians have never fully resolved. What is certain [music] is that the Vatican has kept it displayed it in its most restricted gallery and allowed it to carry its improbable story forward through the centuries alongside the [music] extraordinary mosaic floor that gives the room its official name.

[00:07:42]The combination is uniquely Vatican. A floor that survived Hadrian's empire and 2,000 years of transportation and display in the same small room as a chair whose story involves papal gender verification. Few people in the world have stood in this room.

[00:07:56]Fewer still have thought carefully about which of its two objects is the stranger thing to find here. 03 The Niccoline Chapel's ceiling stars for Angelico's private vision of heaven tucked into the oldest surviving section of the Apostolic Palace, a tower dating to the pontificate of Innocent III in the late 12th century.

[00:08:14]Built when the papal complex was still a series of medieval defensive structures >> [music] >> rather than the accumulated Renaissance and Baroque grandeur that now surrounds it is a private chapel whose ceiling is by any reasonable measure >> [music] >> one of the most beautiful small spaces ever painted by a human hand. The Cappella Niccolina, the Niccoline Chapel, was commissioned by Pope Nicholas V in 1447 and decorated between 1,447 and 1,451 by Fra Angelico the Dominican friar whose contemporaries called him [music] Beato Angelico, the blessed angelic one, for the spiritual quality of his art as much as for his personal holiness.

[00:08:55]>> [music] >> Fra Angelico frescoed every surface of the small room, the walls with scenes from the lives of Saint Stephen and Saint Lawrence, the two [music] great deacon martyrs of the early church.

[00:09:04]Rendered in colors so jewel-like, deep lapis lazuli blues burning vermillion reds burnished gold that they appear almost miraculous in their preservation.

[00:09:16]>> [music] >> And above all of this, filling the ceiling vault, a sky of deep brilliant blue scattered with golden stars with the four evangelists painted [music] at the intersections of the arching ribs that divide the vault into sections.

[00:09:28]Almost no visitor to the Vatican ever stands beneath this ceiling.

[00:09:31]>> [music] >> The chapel is not on the standard Vatican Museums route. Its door, tucked into a corridor on the edge of the public access area, is kept locked during ordinary visiting hours. To enter requires a specifically arranged private tour with advanced booking, the kind of tour most visitors never know exists, and that even many regular Rome travelers, including some who have visited the Vatican many times, >> [music] >> have never been inside. What makes the access restriction genuinely poignant is the size of what is being kept. This is not a vast collection spread across multiple galleries. It is a single room, roughly 8 m by 5. You could stand in the middle and look at every surface without moving [music] your feet.

[00:10:11]And yet the ceiling stars that Fra Angelico painted as a private act of devotion for a single Pope's personal prayer, [music] in a room designed for exactly one person's use, remain nearly as private today [music] as the day they were completed in 1451, seen by perhaps a few thousand visitors a year in a building that processes 6 million. 04 The Apostolic Penitentiary's confession register, sins only the Pope can absolve. The Apostolic Penitentiary is not a place most Catholics have ever heard of, and the chances of any non-Catholic hearing of it are considerably lower still. It is one of the oldest functioning judicial bodies in the Catholic Church, the tribunal that handles what canon law calls sins reserved to the Holy See, meaning matters so grave that only the Pope himself or his explicitly delegated representative in this tribunal can grant absolution from them. The categories of sin handled by the Penitentiary are not widely discussed publicly for reasons the institution considers [music] self-evident. The confessional seal extends to the written record of these matters as much as to [music] the spoken original. What is known from canonical sources is that the reserved cases include the most extreme violations of the Church's most foundational moral and legal commitments, desecration of the Eucharist, violation of the sacramental seal of confession by a confessor, physical violence against the Pope, [music] and a small number of equally grave categories. The physical records of these cases, the documentation held within the Apostolic Penitentiary's own internal archive, separate from and more restricted than the broader Apostolic Archive, are seen by essentially no one outside the tribunal's own personnel.

[00:11:47]They are not available to general scholarly research.

[00:11:50]>> [music] >> They are not covered by the same access framework that has gradually, if carefully, opened portions of the broader archive to qualified academic researchers. They occupy a category of restricted record that the institution has maintained without meaningful relaxation across its eight centuries of operation. What sits in those files is genuinely unknown to the world outside, and the institutional structure is specifically designed to ensure it stays that way. It is not a collection of documents whose content can be guessed at from external context [music] in the way that, say, diplomatic correspondence from a given era can be broadly characterized. The Penitentiary's records describe individual human souls at moments of extreme moral crisis, moments so private and so serious that even cataloging their general nature in a public script feels like a kind of violation of the principle the institution exists to protect. 05: The original Borgia Apartment wall passages, [music] hidden corridors inside the paintings. We have explored the Borgia Apartments in several earlier entries in this series, the six rooms that Julius II [music] sealed with black crepe in 1503 because he refused to breathe the same air as his predecessor [music] Alexander VI, and that sat in darkness for nearly four centuries before being reopened in 1889 as display galleries. What deserves separate examination here [music] is something within the physical structure of these rooms that most visitors, even those fortunate enough to see the Pinturicchio frescoes in person, never have reason to consider. The wall passages built [music] into the fabric of the Borgia Tower itself. Medieval and Renaissance towers of the type the Borgias occupied were regularly built with service passages inside their walls. Narrow channels through the thick stone that allowed servants to move between floors without using the >> [music] >> main staircases, allowed ventilation to circulate through the building, and [music] on occasion provided additional routes that the building's principal occupants could use for movement that they preferred not to have witnessed.

[00:13:43]The Borgia Tower's thickness makes such passages architecturally possible, and historical accounts referencing private movement within the tower during the Borgia pontificate suggest that some form of internal passage existed.

[00:13:55][music] Whether these passages are navigable today, what their current physical condition is, >> [music] >> and whether they connect to the spaces that contemporary Vatican staff describe as behind the visible surfaces of the Borgia rooms, are questions that the Vatican's own structural conservation work ongoing, >> [music] >> as in every historic building of this age, has not disclosed publicly. The frescoed walls that visitors see when the apartments are open represent the surface of a building whose interior structure, behind the [music] painting, has been seen by far fewer people than any tour of the visible rooms would suggest. What we know for certain is this. The paintings themselves are extraordinary.

[00:14:32]>> [music] >> Pinturicchio's colors remain vivid after more than five centuries of sealed darkness, and the 2016 restoration work revealed previously hidden details, including the metallic studs embedded in the painted surfaces >> [music] >> to simulate gemstones in the figures' robes that no one had examined since the room >> [music] >> were first sealed.

[00:14:51]What we do not know, because the Vatican's conservation documentation is itself restricted, is how deep [music] the rabbit hole goes behind the wall where the paint stops. 06, the room where Queen Christina of Sweden converted to Catholicism inside the Tower of Winds. We examined the Tower of Winds Meridian Room for its role in the Gregorian calendar reform, but the same tower contains a second extraordinary historical layer that almost no one who knows the building's astronomical significance is also aware of.

[00:15:21]One of its rooms served, in the mid-17th century, >> [music] >> as the first Vatican residence of Queen Christina of Sweden, one of the most celebrated intellectual figures of the Baroque era, and the most significant royal convert to Catholicism in the history [music] of the Reformation period. Christina was the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Protestant king whose military campaigns during the 30 Years War >> [music] >> had made him one of Catholicism's most formidable opponents. She abdicated her throne in 1654, partly [music] for complex personal reasons that historians still debate, and partly to enable what she had already privately decided, conversion to Catholicism, a step impossible while she remained the head of a formally Protestant state. She arrived in Rome in 1655, received by Pope Alexander VII with extraordinary ceremony, and was given rooms in the Tower of Winds as her temporary Vatican residence, a choice that placed the most famous Catholic convert of her generation in the same tower whose floor still bore the meridian line that had reformed calendar she brought with her from Sweden.

[00:16:23]>> [music] >> The room Christina occupied in the Tower of the Meridian Hall itself, before its astronomical purpose was fully restored, is not accessible to any visitor today.

[00:16:32]It sits inside a tower that has been closed to the public since the 1930s.

[00:16:36]Its frescoes undisturbed, its stone floors unworn by tourist traffic, its specific historical resonance Catholic convert, former Protestant queen, sleeping above the marble line that had 10 years earlier given the world the calendar she used, known to a small number of Vatican historians, and essentially [music] no one else.

[00:16:56]Christina herself went on to become one of the most important art patrons and intellectual figures of the late 17th century in Rome, assembling a collection of paintings, manuscripts, and antiquities that eventually dispersed [music] into other European collections, the Vatican Library's portion of Botticelli's Divine Comedy illustrations among them. She died in Rome in 1689 and is buried in the Vatican Grottoes, one of only three women whose remains rest in the same underground space as the Popes.

[00:17:23]>> [music] >> The room where she first stayed in Rome, above the gallery of maps, above the line that gave her calendar, has not changed since she left it. 07 The sealed gold seals of the Apostolic Archive papal authority preserved in metal.

[00:17:38]Among the specific holdings of the Vatican Apostolic Archive that have their own dedicated conservation laboratory, a facility opened in 1980 specifically for this one category of object is a collection described in the archive's own documentation as containing hundreds of thousands of seals, wax seals and sealing wax impressions, paper seals and golden and leaden bulla.

[00:17:59]The bulla deserves specific attention here. A bulla from the same Latin root as the English bubble, >> [music] >> describing the rounded shape, is a small disc of gold or lead suspended from a cord bearing on one face the name of the reigning Pope and on the other a depiction of Saints Peter and Paul used as the physical authentication mechanism for the most significant category [music] of papal documents. Papal bulls, the formal documents issued under a Pope's highest authority, which get their name from this disc, >> [music] >> were authenticated for over a thousand years by exactly this physical object.

[00:18:31]The bulla was what made a papal decree legally binding across the medieval and early modern world. The archive holds hundreds of thousands of these objects spanning from the earliest surviving examples of papal correspondence through the period when wax eventually replaced leaden and [music] gold bulla as the standard authentication method. Many of them are extraordinarily fine metalwork.

[00:18:52]The gold examples in particular represent both the craft standards of their era and [music] the specific iconographic choices of whatever artist was responsible for cutting the dies from which they were struck. They are, individually, [music] small enough to hold in a closed fist. Collectively, they constitute the single largest surviving body of evidence for how papal documentary authority was physically [music] expressed across more than a millennium. Virtually no living person outside the archives' own conservation staff and a small number of specifically credentialed numismatic and sphragistic seal history scholars has ever held one of these objects or examined what directly.

[00:19:28]They're not displayed.

[00:19:30]They are not loaned for exhibition. They rest in the seal restoration and conservation laboratories, carefully maintained storage, awaiting the attention of specialists who apply each year for access, most of whom are declined. And a few of whom, granted admission, [music] describe the experience of seeing hundreds of thousands of tiny metal objects representing the physical voice of the medieval papacy as something entirely unlike anything a museum [music] display has ever offered them.

[00:19:55]08: The Vatican's Ethnological Museum, thousands of objects from missionaries that nobody visits. Since 1927, when Pope Pius XI [music] established it in the context of a major Vatican missionary exhibition, the Vatican's Museo Missionario Ethnologico, the Missionary Ethnological Museum, has housed one of the most unusual and least visited major collections of cultural artifacts anywhere in Europe.

[00:20:20]Approximately 80,000 objects gathered by Catholic missionaries working across every continent, donated to the Holy See from mission stations in Asia, [music] Africa, the Americas, and Oceania across the 19th and 20th centuries. The collection was first housed in the Lateran Palace, moved to the Vatican Museums complex in 1973, [music] and given permanent gallery space in a wing of the museums that the overwhelming majority of visitors, >> [music] >> proceeding toward the Sistine Chapel, never enter.

[00:20:47]Its objects include ritual objects, textiles, >> [music] >> musical instruments, weapons, ceremonial garments, masks, carved figures, and architectural fragments from cultures ranging from indigenous communities of the Amazon basin to Imperial China, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arctic. Each object arrived in Rome via a specific missionary and specific mission station, often with documentation about the specific community from which it came. When the museum opened its ethnological materials conservation laboratory in 2000, specifically because existing Vatican conservation facilities lacked expertise in the range of composite materials that ethnological objects Volpe acknowledged something significant.

[00:21:29]This was a collection that had been physically present in Rome for more than seven decades without the conservation infrastructure needed to properly care for it. The 80,000 objects had been accumulating >> [music] >> in storage and in understaffed galleries waiting for the institutional investment that even now arrives slowly given how completely the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael rooms dominate the Vatican's conservation resources and visitor attention. Walking into the ethnological museum on any ordinary visiting day >> [music] >> is an experience that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Vatican Museums complex.

[00:22:03]>> [music] >> Where other galleries process thousands of visitors an hour through art that the entire world knows by name, the ethnological museum's galleries are quiet to the point of emptiness. Its objects from 47 nations and every inhabited continent on Earth seen by a tiny fraction of the 6 million who enter the museums every year without ever knowing this wing exists. 094 Nuns >> [music] >> who measured 481,215 stars and were unknown for a century.

[00:22:31]This entry is unusual in the series because it focuses not on an object itself, but on the objects produced.

[00:22:37]Star catalog plates held in the Vatican Observatory's historical archive bearing measurements made by four women whose contribution to astronomy was so thoroughly unacknowledged that their very names remained unknown for nearly a century after their work was complete.

[00:22:52]In the 1890s, as the Vatican Observatory participated [music] in the ambitious International Carte du Ciel project, an effort to photograph and catalog the entire sky divided among observatories across the world, the director of the Vatican's contribution needed personnel to measure and record the data from thousands of photographic plates.

[00:23:10][music] He recruited four Silvestrian nuns, Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi, and Luigia Panzeri. Together, they measured the positions and magnitudes of 481,215 [music] stars from the Vatican's Carte du Ciel photographs. Their work was published.

[00:23:29]Their contribution was real and significant, and their names were not attached to any [music] of it. The catalog listed the Vatican Observatory as the institution.

[00:23:38]The nuns who had performed the actual measurement work appeared nowhere in the scientific record. This was not unusual for the era. Women scientists across the world in this period contributed anonymously to major astronomical projects. Their labor essential and their credit non-existent.

[00:23:55]>> [music] >> But its specific consequence for this story is that for nearly a century no one knew who had done the work. The historian Sabino Maffeo found a document in 2016 that finally named them. Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi, and Luigia Panzeri. Four nuns who spent years measuring the positions of stars by hand from photographic plates whose work forms part of the Vatican Observatory's historical archive whose names exist on a single document that a researcher found a century after their deaths. The plates they measured still exist >> [music] >> held in Vatican Observatory storage.

[00:24:31]The names on those plates are institutional. The hands that made the measurements belong to four women nobody remembered for 100 years and almost nobody knows about now. 10. The Hanno bone fragment. What was found under a heating system in 1962. In 1962, workers installing a new heating system in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican Museums unearthed fragments [music] of bone and a large tooth from the soil beneath the pavement. The initial response, according to accounts of the discovery, >> [music] >> was confusion.

[00:24:59]The remains were large enough to prompt speculation about dinosaurs >> [music] >> before anyone thought to look more carefully at the circumstances. When they did, a different and more specifically Vatican answer emerged. The bones were Hanno's.

[00:25:13]The white Asian elephant given to Pope Leo [music] X by King Manuel I of Portugal in 1514.

[00:25:20]The elephant that Raphael painted on the entrance wall of the Vatican.

[00:25:24]The elephant whose death in 1516 prompted Leo X to personally compose a Latin epitaph and order a formal burial in the Belvedere courtyard. His bones had been there the entire time. Undisturbed in their burial spot for 446 years until a [music] heating installation project in 1962 brought them back to light. The specific bone fragments and tooth recovered in 1962 were identified and documented by Vatican staff, but they were not subsequently placed on public display, [music] added to any permanent museum collection, or given any particular institutional prominence.

[00:25:59]Hanno's remains after their extraordinary underground tenure, after their accidental rediscovery, after the brief moment of misidentified wonder they caused, returned to a form of obscurity appropriate to their owner's story. Significant to those who know the context, invisible to those who don't.

[00:26:16]Today, several sources confirm that Hanno's skeleton or its remnants are held somewhere within the Vatican's institutional holdings.

[00:26:23]A fact that sits comfortably alongside the skeleton's documented appearance in the historical records as the Vatican's elephant, but the specific location of the bone fragments within the Vatican storage >> [music] >> systems and the condition they are currently in are details that have not been made public. [music] What the workers found in 1962 was real. Where it is now is one of the Vatican's more charming small mysteries. 11, the Papal Audience Hall's permanent seat reserved for a body that has never filled it. The Paul VI Audience Hall, built by the architect Pier Luigi Nervi, and completed in 1971, can seat up to 12,000 people >> [music] >> and is the largest enclosed space in Vatican City, a vast concrete structure whose asymmetric shell roof rises dramatically behind the right side of St. >> [music] >> Peter's Basilica, straddling the boundary between Vatican territory and Italian territory in a way that required specific legal arrangements when it was constructed. [music] Inside the hall, at the center of the semicircular stage from which the Pope delivers his weekly general audiences, is a single chair, the sedia gestatoria in its modern, stripped-down form, the functional throne from which the Pope speaks.

[00:27:32]This chair has been seen by millions of people in person and by billions on broadcast footage of papal audiences. It is not a hidden object in any ordinary sense. What almost no visitor to a general audience notices, or has any reason to notice, is the specific spatial planning of the hall around that chair.

[00:27:49]The entire [music] architectural design of Nervi's building, its sightlines calculated by one of the 20th century's greatest structural engineers, converges on exactly one point. Every seat in the hall faces it.

[00:28:02]Every acoustic and visual calculation made during the building's design was made in relation to it.

[00:28:07]The chair is empty for the overwhelming majority of the hall's existence. It sits on an empty stage during the years [music] between Popes, between audiences, in the small hours of weekday mornings when the building is dark.

[00:28:20]And yet, everything around it was designed by a genius of structural engineering >> [music] >> and given the resources of a sovereign state specifically to point toward that single chair and the single person who sits in it for a few hours each Wednesday. The hall's permanent seat [music] has been occupied, really occupied, for perhaps a few thousand hours in its 50-year history.

[00:28:41]For the remaining hundreds of thousands of hours, it simply waits. The entire building built around it in a darkness that the 12,000 seats around it cannot fill. 12 the hallway Michelangelo walked every day for 4 years, still there, never open. Between 1,508 and 1,512, Michelangelo commuted. Every day he was working on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

[00:29:05]He walked from his living quarters through a specific sequence of corridors >> [music] >> and connecting passages to reach the chapel and walked back the same way when the day's work was done. He complained about this work constantly in letters to his father and to friends about the physical agony of painting upside down, about the mold growing on the wet plaster, about the Pope's impatience with the project's pace.

[00:29:28]These letters survive.

[00:29:30]The route he walked does not survive in any tourist's experience because the corridors connecting the areas where resident Vatican staff and workers lived in the 16th century [music] to the working spaces of the Apostolic Palace have never been part of any public access route.

[00:29:45]>> [music] >> What we know from architectural histories of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace is that the connecting passages between buildings added and modified across different papal building campaigns stretching from the medieval period through the Renaissance >> [music] >> include corridors whose floors and walls have changed surprisingly little since Michelangelo's time, not because of deliberate preservation, but because the Vatican has had neither the need nor the resources to modify spaces that have simply remained in routine administrative use across five centuries.

[00:30:14]Somewhere in the Vatican's [music] connected complex of buildings, the floor on which Michelangelo walked to his most famous work still exists.

[00:30:21]Set into a corridor used now for the institutional routines of whoever works in that part of the building carrying correspondence, attending meetings, moving between offices.

[00:30:31]>> [music] >> It has never been identified as a heritage site, marked with a plaque, or made the subject of any specific conservation attention. It is simply part of the floor, >> [music] >> anonymous and functional, walked on daily by people who almost certainly do not know what they are walking on. 13, >> [music] >> the Vatican Gardens hidden shrines, 17 acres of sacred objects with no official visitor count. The Vatican Gardens cover more than 23 hectares, more than half of Vatican City's total territory, and have been cultivated >> [music] >> in one form or another since Pope Nicholas III established a private garden within the Leonine Wall in the 13th century. Arranged across their terrain, often in locations deliberately shielded from the sightlines of the main public areas, are religious shrines, sacred grottoes, memorial monuments, and devotional objects installed by Popes and visiting dignitaries across seven centuries. Access to the gardens is restricted. [music] They can be visited only through specific guided tours with advanced booking. But even within those tours, the route covers only a portion of the total garden area. The more remote sections, the small shrines tucked into hedge alcoves, and the memorial stone installations placed [music] at the farthest edges of the grounds, are encountered by an even smaller number of people than the official tour number suggest.

[00:31:46]Some portions of the gardens are effectively off-limits even to tour groups. Among the most restricted of these hidden sacred locations [music] is the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, a replica of the Massabielle Grotto at Lourdes [music] constructed in 1902 surrounded by dense vegetation that screens it from the gardens' main paths. Used by individual Popes for private prayer with a consistency that has made it one of the most personally significant spaces in Vatican territory. Pope John Paul II prayed there regularly.

[00:32:16]Pope Benedict XVI visited it. Pope Francis, despite his general reluctance to use the Vatican's grander ceremonial apparatus, was documented [music] visiting the Lourdes Grotto privately during his pontificate. The Grotto is not on any standard tour map. It is not marked on general Vatican floor plans available to visitors.

[00:32:33]>> [music] >> It is simply there, in the gardens, surrounded by its hedges, a small replica of a place that millions of Catholics journey to Lourdes to see.

[00:32:41][music] And in this version, visited by a handful of people and one Pope at a time. In quiet that the Lourdes original, with its millions of pilgrims, can never offer. 14, the Archivio Segreto's reading room, where scholars wait, nervous. In Italian, the process of gaining access to the Vatican Apostolic Archive is itself such an unusual experience >> [music] >> that it deserves treatment as an object in its own right. An encounter so specific, so ritualized, and so unlike anything else in modern institutional life, that the people who have been through it tend to remember the procedure as vividly as anything they actually read once they were inside.

[00:33:20]A scholar wishing to consult the archive must first obtain a letter of recommendation from an established researcher at a reputable academic institution. Not a general character reference, but a specific scholarly endorsement of the research project and of the applicant's qualifications to handle archival material responsibly.

[00:33:39]This letter, along with a detailed application form specifying research interests and proposed dates, must be submitted well in advance.

[00:33:47]If accepted, the scholar receives a formal letter of invitation. On the appointed day, the scholar presents themselves at the Porta di Sant'Anna, the side gate of Vatican City, near the entrance to St. Peter's, where a Swiss Guard waves them through.

[00:33:59]>> [music] >> They proceed past the Vatican's post office and car park to the archive itself, where, as [music] one medievalist who underwent this process described it, they sign in, present all their documentation, and wait nervously for their interview.

[00:34:13]The interview is conducted entirely in Italian, regardless of the applicant's native language. There is no provision for translation. Italian is the language of the archive, as it has been since the archive was formalized. Inside, [music] the reading room operates like a conventional scholarly archive. The experience simultaneously more ordinary and more extraordinary than the institution's reputation prepares [music] a first-time visitor for.

[00:34:37]Ordinary because the process of ordering, waiting [music] for, and examining documents follows familiar research protocols. Extraordinary because the folder placed in front of you might contain a letter written by Galileo or a draft of a treaty signed by Napoleon or correspondence between a medieval pope and a Mongol Khan.

[00:34:54]The reading room has been open to qualified researchers since Pope Leo the 13th unlocked it in 1881.

[00:35:00]It holds, [music] according to one account, material created after 1922 that remains closed to preserve diplomatic and personal confidentiality.

[00:35:09]Even scholars who have worked there for decades [music] have touched only a fraction of what it contains.

[00:35:14]15.

[00:35:15]The sealed room, the Vatican has never officially confirmed contains anything at all.

[00:35:20]>> [music] >> We end this script where this series has ended before.

[00:35:23]Not with a specific named object, but with a category of object whose existence is implied by everything the Vatican's history suggests and confirmed by nothing the Vatican has ever officially acknowledged. In an institution that has been accumulating objects, documents, decisions [music] and decisions about decisions for 2,000 years, in a building complex whose architecture spans 12 centuries, >> [music] >> and whose storage spaces were created in different eras by people with different cataloging systems using different languages, the mathematical likelihood that something genuinely significant [music] sits in a space whose contents have not been systematically reviewed in living memory is not a matter of conspiracy theory. It is simply a matter of arithmetic.

[00:36:04]>> [music] >> We know from documented historical precedent that the Shenon parchment lay misfiled for seven centuries before Barbara Frale found it in 2001 while looking for something else. We know that a Catullus manuscript sat under the wrong reference number for three centuries before William Gardner Hale recognized it in 1896.

[00:36:23]>> [music] >> We know that Vatican Museums' curators periodically discover that works attributed to minor assistants are, on closer examination, by more significant hands. These are not ancient history.

[00:36:34]They are the most recent examples of an ongoing pattern. In the Tower of Winds, there are floors that tourists have not walked on since the 1930s.

[00:36:42]>> [music] >> In the Apostolic Archives' deepest holdings, there are folders that have not been touched since they were transferred from Avignon in the 14th century. [music] In the Vatican Museums' Depositi Vaticani, there are sliding metal storage racks that, by the institution's own estimate, hold more works than are on public display. And not all of those racks have been fully cataloged, even by the institution's own staff. The sealed room at the end of this list [music] contains what it contains. The Vatican knows approximately what that is, more approximately than you might expect for an institution of this age and complexity, and considerably less certainly than its public face of complete custodial control might suggest. And for every scholar who has waited nervously in Italian for their interview in the Archives' reading room, there has always been just a few hundred meters away was a door they did not know existed, leading to a room whose contents nobody living has yet been asked to verify. What these 15 objects share, more than any other quality, is an invisibility that doesn't come from deliberate concealment. The Tower of Winds' Meridian Room is invisible because the millions of people walking beneath it have no way to know it exists. The Niccoline Chapel is invisible because it requires a specific tour that most visitors [music] never think to arrange. The Four Nuns' star measurements were invisible because the era in which they were made did not consider women's contributions worth acknowledging. Henno's bones were invisible for 446 years because no one disturbed the ground above them. The Vatican is often discussed as an institution that hides things. This series has explored, extensively, [music] the things it actually does hide: the sealed archives, the locked relics, the restricted galleries, the theological judgment about what the world is not yet ready to see.

[00:38:22]But, the 15 objects in this script reveal something slightly different. Not secrecy, exactly, [music] but the simple structural consequence of having accumulated so much across so many centuries and so many rooms that the institution's own self-knowledge of what it contains has never quite caught up with the reality of what is actually there. Above the gallery of maps, a room [music] that proved the calendar was wrong, sits in darkness.

[00:38:48]In the Ethnological Museum, 80,000 objects from 47 nations wait in near-empty galleries.

[00:38:55]>> [music] >> In the Vatican Gardens, a private Lord's Grotto screens itself with hedges from a few hundred meters away from the most visited square in the world. [music] And somewhere in the storage racks of an institution whose holdings have never been fully cataloged, something significant waits as it has, probably, for longer than anyone currently alive has been alive for the specific afternoon when the right person walks past the right shelf, opens the right folder, and discovers that what seemed like nothing was, all along, something.

[00:39:24]Which of these 15 hidden objects would you most want to see for yourself? Let us know in the comments. We read every single one. Thank you so much for watching.

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