Vatican City, Rome and Italy are expected to see an increase in visitors in 2025, a jubilee year for the Catholic Church.
The Italian capital, which includes the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica, is expected to receive some 35 million tourists and pilgrims, more than 10 times the population of Rome.
And just as there were complaints about price rises in Paris in 2023 and 2024, in the run-up to the recent Summer Olympics, Rome is now being accused of being a rip-off. And not by Italian cities competing with Rome for business, or by Protestants crying that they are the Whore of Babylon, or even by atheist and secular cynics about religion.
According to Elizabeth Lev, an expert on Christian art who leads tours of Catholic shrines in Rome, pilgrims and tourists are facing “shameless extortion.”
The exorbitant prices are being charged at “the oldest and most venerable basilicas in Christendom,” said Lev, who listed St. Peter’s, which is in the Vatican, and Santa Maria Maggiore, a 3.5-kilometer walk from St. Peter’s on the Esquiline Hill, one of Rome’s seven hills.
Santa Maria Maggiore overlooks another of Rome’s most expensive sights: the Colosseum. Admission starts at €20, the same as the Vatican Museums.
In his book The Catholic Thing, Lev criticised the introduction of an entrance fee of €1.50 for all visitors to St. Peter’s who are accompanied by a guide.
Although the entrance fee is less than what a visitor would pay for a cup of coffee or an ice cream in one of Rome’s restaurants, visitors must still wait while the guide queues for a ticket.
For more than a decade, the Vatican has required visitors taking tours of St. Peter’s to wear headphones. The measure has been criticized for sometimes forcing people to wait in lines for hours, in temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsius, to enter the vast church.
The caretakers of the Pantheon, a former Roman temple with a roof considered a marvel of engineering, and of St Mary Major are also accused of price-gouging. They are said to have set up a ‘racket’ and ‘pay to play’ system by charging high fees for ‘early bird’ visits before the heat set in and the number of visitors would soar later in the day.
The practice of a Jubilee year dates back to ancient Israel and the Old Testament. According to Pope Francis, a Jubilee year signifies “the special gift of grace, marked by the forgiveness of sins.”
