Is St. Peter really buried under the Vatican?
A.D. 64, the apostle Peter was arrested, brought to one of the great imperial circuses in Rome and martyred on an inverted cross. His body was taken outside the walls of the arena and there, on the side of what was called the Vatican Hill, he was buried, perhaps in a small roofed grave. Almost three hundred years later, Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, declared that a great church be built on the site of the tomb of St. Peter which had evolved from a simple grave to a small shrine. Anchored on the grave of the apostle, the first St. Peter’s Basilica incorporated the original shrine into the altar floor. But twelve hundred years later, when the first basilica was replaced, the details of Peter’s burial had been forgotten. The Vatican had long held the tradition that Peter was buried under the basilica, but even as late as the 1930s, they didn’t really have any proof. in 1939, workers renovating the grottoes beneath St. Peter’s, the traditional burial area of the popes,
