Most visitors assume every pope of the modern era ends up in the same place beneath St Peter’s Basilica. That assumption is mostly right and, for the man who held the job most recently, completely wrong. Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday 2025, was buried at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore across the city, the first pope interred outside Vatican City since Leo XIII in 1903. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, went into the Grottoes in 2023 and lies there now. Understanding why one went one way and one went the other requires knowing what the Grottoes actually are, which is where most guidebooks get vague.
A level, not a crypt
The Vatican Grottoes sit roughly three meters below the current floor of St Peter’s Basilica, stretching from the high altar back to about halfway down the nave. Think of it less as a single burial chamber and more as a semi-underground floor sandwiched between two other levels: the basilica you walk through on a normal visit sits above it, and a much older, much deeper Roman-era necropolis sits below it. The Grottoes occupy the middle layer, built into the space created when the current basilica was raised over the older Constantinian one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
That middle position explains the name confusion that trips up almost every first-time visitor. “Grottoes” and “necropolis” get used interchangeably online, but Vatican sources are explicit that they are not the same thing. Wikipedia’s summary states it plainly: “The Vatican Grottoes are not to be confused with the Vatican Necropolis, which is an ancient burial ground that dates back to the Roman times.” One is a papal burial gallery built centuries ago inside a Renaissance basilica. The other is a pagan and early Christian cemetery excavated in the twentieth century, several meters further down.
Free floor, paid floor
That distinction matters practically as well as historically. The Grottoes function as part of a normal basilica visit, reached by a staircase near one of the piers supporting the dome, and third-party travel sources consistently report there’s no separate charge to walk through them. I couldn’t confirm that free-entry claim on an official Vatican page during this research, so treat it as commonly reported rather than officially stated, though it fits how the space functions: an open pass-through rather than a ticketed attraction.
The Necropolis, often called the Scavi, works entirely differently. It’s listed as a standalone bookable product on the official basilica site, alongside the Dome and the Treasury Museum, and it has to be reserved in advance through the Vatican’s own booking system rather than walked into on the day. I wasn’t able to verify a current ticket price or a minimum-age requirement from any official page reached this session, so don’t quote a figure to a client without checking it fresh. What the Vatican’s own description does confirm is the flavor of the experience: the necropolis, it says, “remained inaccessible and untouched for sixteen centuries” before excavation, and visiting it “reveals itself as a place that leads us to rediscover a world of the living” among the ancient Roman and early Christian tombs beneath the central nave.
Ninety-one popes, one floor
According to Wikipedia’s count, the Grottoes hold “the tombs of 91 popes,” a figure spanning centuries of burials as the basilica above it was rebuilt, expanded, and reorganized. That number covers everyone from early medieval pontiffs to several twentieth-century ones, arranged in niches and side chapels along the gallery rather than in one uniform row.
Among the confirmed twentieth-century burials, Benedict XVI is the one worth knowing in detail, because his tomb has an unusual history attached to it. After he died on 31 December 2022, with his funeral held on 5 January 2023, he was placed “in the same tomb that had previously been occupied by Pope John Paul II’s body from his death in 2005 until his beatification in 2011.” John Paul II himself had rested in that same Grottoes niche for six years before his remains were moved up into the main basilica, to the Altar of St Sebastian, following his beatification. So the same physical spot in the Grottoes has now housed two different popes at two different points, decades apart.
Several other twentieth-century popes are widely reported to be buried in the Grottoes too, among them Pius XII, Pius XI, Pius X, Benedict XV, Paul VI, and John Paul I. I didn’t independently re-verify each individual burial location against a primary source this session, so I’ll flag those six as generally accepted rather than freshly confirmed, and I’d want a guide checking a specific chapel name before stating it as fact on a tour.
Why Francis broke the pattern
Given all that, Francis is the fact that upends a visitor’s assumption fastest. He died on 21 April 2025, Easter Monday, and was buried not in the Grottoes but at Santa Maria Maggiore, “in the burial niche in the side aisle between the Pauline Chapel (Chapel of the Salus Populi Romani) and the Sforza Chapel of the Basilica.” It made him the first pope buried outside Vatican City in well over a century. If a guest on a tour asks whether Francis is downstairs with the others, the honest answer is no, and the reason is worth explaining rather than glossing over: he chose a different resting place entirely, breaking with the pattern nearly every other twentieth-century pope followed.
What the Grottoes don’t include
One thing the Grottoes visit does not give you is the tomb of St Peter himself. That sits deeper still, within the area of the Clementine Chapel behind the papal altar, accessible on the separate Scavi tour rather than the open Grottoes route. A basilica visit and a Grottoes walk-through will show you where popes from recent centuries are laid to rest. They won’t put you in front of the apostle’s own burial site; that requires the reserved, paid necropolis tour instead.
Planning around basilica hours
St Peter’s Basilica itself, which governs when the Grottoes staircase is open, publishes summer hours as “from 7.00 am to 8:00 pm” starting 1 June. I could not find an official page stating separate opening or last-entry times specifically for the Grottoes, so build in a buffer rather than assuming the whole basilica’s closing time applies right up to the last minute in the lower level. Security screening in St Peter’s Square adds its own queue before you even reach the basilica doors, and that queue is usually the longer wait of the two.
Dress code applies underground exactly as it does upstairs: shoulders and knees covered for everyone, no exceptions made because the light is dimmer and the crowd thinner. Beyond that, treat the Grottoes as an extension of whatever basilica etiquette staff are enforcing that day rather than a separate set of rules; I found nothing official spelling out Grottoes-specific conduct beyond the basilica’s general standard, so follow the guidance of whoever is on duty at the staircase.
Under Pope Leo XIV, elected in May 2025 as the first US-born pope, none of this access pattern has changed. The Grottoes remain what they’ve been for centuries: a working papal cemetery you can walk through on foot, distinct from both the basilica above it and the ancient necropolis below. If you’d rather see St Peter’s own tomb and the older excavated level rather than just the papal gallery, our St Peter’s tomb tickets and tours page covers how to book the reserved Scavi visit separately from a standard basilica entry.