Reading the Renaissance Rooms of Castel Sant'Angelo

The frescoes inside this fortress are the part most visits walk past on the way to the terrace, and they are the reason to take a guide. They were painted when Rome was rediscovering classical philosophy, literature and art, and they do something specific with it. Pagan material is not hidden or apologised for: gods, myths and grotesques are put on the walls of a pope's private rooms and made to serve a Christian argument. Ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, sacred and profane are laid over each other deliberately, and the whole scheme is arranged to glorify the papacy by claiming antiquity as its own inheritance. Without someone to point out what is being claimed, the rooms read as decoration. The building underneath the decoration explains itself too. Hadrian's tomb was already a stronghold in the late empire because of its size and its position on the northern approach, which is where invasions came from. The middle ages turned it into a fortress and the Renaissance improved it, adding a garrison, prisons and the apartments the pope would live in if he had to move here in a hurry, reachable from the Vatican along the Passetto di Borgo. The group is small and guided in English throughout.