Most people searching for “the Bramante Staircase” are looking at the wrong staircase. The famous double-helix spiral photographed at the exit of the Vatican Museums — the one you have seen a thousand times on Instagram, with the bronze balustrade and the light-well overhead — is not by Bramante. It is by an Italian architect named Giuseppe Momo, and it was built in 1932. Bramante’s real staircase is a different staircase, in a different building, four hundred and twenty years older, and unless you have booked a specific special-access tour, you have almost certainly never seen it.
Almost every tourist blog and social post that names “the Bramante Staircase” is showing Momo’s 1932 ramp. Even reputable sources acknowledge this: Wonderful Museums, for instance, writes that “most people searching for the Bramante Staircase Vatican are actually picturing Giuseppe Momo’s 1932 double-helix ramp, not Donato Bramante’s original early-sixteenth-century spiral.” Wikipedia’s own solution to the confusion is to devote separate sections to “Original” and “Modern” and just describe them as two.
Here is what each of them actually is.
What Donato Bramante built in 1505
Donato Bramante (c. 1444-1514) was the leading Renaissance architect working in Rome at the turn of the sixteenth century. His most famous project was the design for the rebuild of St Peter’s Basilica, started in 1506 and taken through by successive architects long after his death. Before that, in 1505, Pope Julius II commissioned him to redesign the Belvedere complex north of the papal apartments and connect it to the rest of the Vatican Palace.
One piece of that commission was a spiral staircase, built inside a square tower of the Belvedere Palace. Wikipedia’s description is worth quoting in full: “The original Bramante staircase, in the Pio-Clementine Museum, was built in 1505 to a double helix design by Donato Bramante. It connects the Belvedere palace of Pope Innocent VIII to the outside and stands in a square tower of that building. The staircase was built to allow Pope Julius II to enter his private residence while still in his carriage, since walking up the several flights in heavy papal vestments would have been onerous.”
Read that carefully. Bramante’s staircase is not a set of steps. It is a gently sloped continuous ramp built as a broad spiral, so that Julius could ride his horse (or be carried in a litter) all the way up to his private residence without dismounting. Around the central column, Bramante rotated the classical column orders as you climb — Tuscan at the base, then Doric, then Ionic, then Corinthian, and Composite at the top — a small architectural in-joke that would have delighted his humanist contemporaries.
None of this is what you see on the Vatican Museums’ standard tour.
What Giuseppe Momo built in 1932
By the 1920s the Vatican Museums had a visitor-flow problem: a single monumental staircase at the exit could not manage the volume of tourists ascending and descending simultaneously. Pope Pius XI commissioned a new staircase specifically to handle two-way traffic. The architect was Giuseppe Momo (1875-1940), Turin-trained, who was already working on Momo’s larger project of redesigning the Vatican Gardens.
Wikipedia describes what Momo delivered: “The modern double-helix staircase […] was designed by Giuseppe Momo, sculpted by Antonio Maraini and realized by the Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry in 1932. […] This staircase, like the original, is a double helix, having two staircases allowing people to ascend without meeting people descending.” Bronze balustrade cast by the Marinelli Foundry over travertine steps. A skylight overhead pulls daylight down the well.
Mechanics matter here. Momo’s staircase is technically two ramps intertwined around a shared central well, with a common entry point at the top and a common exit at the bottom. You physically cannot meet someone walking the other direction. That solved the crowding problem, and it produced the visual effect that has made the staircase one of the most photographed spots in the entire Vatican Museums.
Why the two are confused
Momo’s staircase quotes Bramante’s directly. It uses the same double-helix logic (Bramante’s was also a double helix, per the Vatican’s own Pio-Clementine text — a fact the popular “single-helix ramp” description gets slightly wrong). It sits in the same complex. It is nearly always photographed. And when the caption goes up on Instagram, someone types “Bramante Staircase” because that is what they thought they had walked, and the search results feed the confusion for the next tourist.
What makes it worse is that Momo’s staircase is genuinely beautiful. It deserves to be famous under its own name. There is no reason to keep giving Bramante the credit.
When you actually see Momo’s staircase
The Momo staircase is at the very end of the standard visit route. Walks in Rome puts it plainly: “The staircase is only open to visitors wishing to descend.” That is, it is an exit, not an entrance. You reach it after the Sistine Chapel and the long corridor sequence that takes you back toward the atrium.
Included in any standard Vatican Museums ticket. No separate booking. It is where the Museums release you back onto Viale Vaticano. On a busy summer afternoon the queue to walk down (and photograph) it is a real delay; on the 08:00 morning slot it is close to empty by the time you get there.
Photography rules on the staircase
The Vatican Museums’ own useful-information page states verbatim: “It is permitted to take photographs, for personal and domestic use only, of the works in all areas of the Vatican Museums, apart from the Sistine Chapel.” Same page: “The use of tripods, stands, drones and/or professional equipment is not allowed; any eventual use must be authorised by the Directorate of the Museums and Cultural Heritage. The use of telescopic ‘selfie sticks’ is forbidden. Flash photography is strictly forbidden.”
Which means: yes, hand-held phone and camera photos of Momo’s staircase are fine and normal. No, that tripod-and-slow-shutter shot you have seen from professional Instagram accounts is not permitted without written Museum authorisation. The staff at the top and bottom of the staircase enforce this quietly but consistently.
How to actually see Bramante’s staircase in 2026
Not via the standard Museums ticket. Not via the Vatican Gardens tour (a common assumption; the Gardens tour does not include the Belvedere Palace interior). The original Bramante staircase is only accessible on special-access guided tours sold as “hidden Vatican” or “closed-to-public-areas” experiences — the same kind of licensed private product that also unlocks the Cabinet of Masks, the Niccoline Chapel, and other normally-off-limits rooms.
Group sizes are small (roughly twenty maximum). Prices are considerably higher than a standard skip-the-line ticket. And the tours generally run on weekday mornings only, in limited English-language slots. If you specifically want to see Bramante’s original, budget an extra half-day and a proper private-tour fee; the standard 08:00 skip-the-line will not get you there.
Accessibility
Momo’s staircase is the standard exit for the standard visit route, but wheelchair users can bypass it entirely. The Museums have an elevator alternative on the accessible exit route; ask any staff member for the accessible-exit signage from the atrium onward. The step-free path avoids the staircase without adding significant time to the visit.
Two staircases, not one
Two Vatican staircases, four hundred and twenty years apart, both named “Bramante” in the popular imagination and only one of them actually his. Momo’s is the more photographed and the more accessible, and it deserves its own credit line. Bramante’s is the older, more subtle, and mostly-hidden one, and it deserves the extra half-day if you want to see the room a Renaissance pope rode a horse up in 1505.
Our Vatican tours page covers the private and special-access tour formats that include the original Bramante Staircase and other closed-to-public rooms. For the standard Museums visit that ends at Momo’s 1932 staircase, the Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel skip-the-line ticket is what you want, ideally on the 08:00 slot when the exit queue is shortest.