The Museum of the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major preserves a wide and precious variety of ecclesiastical furnishings, furniture, vestments, ornaments, paintings and prints, intimately linked to the liturgy, history and identity of the first Marian shrine in the West.
The three rooms inaugurated on 11 December 2024, in view of the Holy Year 2025, are the fulcrum of the exhibition route.
Situated on the first floor, in the heart of the Canons’ Palace of Pope Paul V (1605-1621), they can be reached via an evocative itinerary that takes the visitor through the Great Staircase of the Canons’ Palace of Benedict XIV (1740-1758) up to the Loggia of the Blessings, with the wonderful mosaic on the façade, passing finally through the Chapter Hall.
The new rooms are divided into three sections, each one dedicated to a specific theme.
The Bethlehem of the West room introduces the role of Saint Mary Major as the Basilica of the Holy Nativity and the place where the Popes have for centuries celebrated the Holy Masses of Christmas Eve, as it houses the wood of the Holy Crib of Jesus. The heart of the display is the first nativity scene in the history of art, created in 1291 by Arnolfo di Cambio. Through an innovative showcase, the medieval masterpiece can be admired up close and from every perspective. The marble group is accompanied by the so-called “Chasuble of Saint Jerome”, a very rare example of a medieval liturgical vestment. The remains of the Doctor of the Church, who chose to live in Bethlehem at the Holy Crib of the Child Jesus, were moved around 1285 from Bethlehem to the Bethlehem of the West, namely the Basilica of Saint Mary Major.
The rooms dedicated to Saint Mary of the Snow and the Treasure of the Salus Populi Romani house two frescoes painted at the time of Paul V by Baldassare Croce. The paintings on the ceilings depict the Miracle of the Snow and the Procession of Saint Gregory the Great. They are in dialogue with the masterpieces displayed in the new space, including two panels with the same subject, works of the Florentine painter Jacopo Zucchi. These latter, after more than two hundred and seventy years, have returned to the Basilica from the Vatican Museums, and are presented together with other important paintings, including The Road to Calvary by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known as il Sodoma, and Domenico Beccafumi’s Madonna with Child and Saints.
The highlight of the Museum is the Salus Populi Romani room, dedicated to the most famous and venerated Marian icon in Rome and in the world. For many centuries, it has played a central role in the religious life of the city, profoundly linked to its identity and to its Popes. On display in the room are some of the most precious donations that the Popes have given to the Icon as votive offerings: the original metal shrine with the silver cover that protected it for more than three hundred years, and the shining crowns and refined jewellery that Gregory XVI (1831-1846) and Pius XII (1939-1958) offered to the Salus, imploring her intercession in the challenges of every age.
The Museum is fully accessible to visitors with disabilities.
The Treasury of the Basilica, located under the right aisle of the Basilica, completes the tour. These spaces were inaugurated on 8 December 2001 by Saint John Paul II (1978-2005). The massive barrel vaults, built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, evoke the atmosphere of a Schatzkammer, a treasury, to house precious masterpieces of the goldsmith’s art.
