Black Card - The Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo

Departure time: on demand

What's included:

• Guided tour
• Booking and handling fee
• Guest relations assistance
• Round-trip transport from Rome
• Lunch in a typical fraschetta (restaurant).
  

Important Information:

• The garden is not currently accessible to wheelchair users or persons with reduced mobility. Visitors are advised to wear comfortable shoes.
•  Access is granted only to visitors who are appropriately dressed (shirts without sleeves, shorts and mini-skirts are not permitted).
  
• The tour itinerary is subject to change due to unanticipated activity on the part of the Holy See or Vatican City State.
•  A cloakroom service is not currently available and only small bags and rucksacks are permitted.
• Only plastic bottles are admitted
• It is possible to make picture but without flash
• Animals ar not accepted in the site
• It is forbidden to eat during the tour.

Who has never wished to visit, at least once in a lifetime, the Pope’s Gardens? That magnificent and secret place overlooking the lake of Castel Gandolfo, where there is a perfect equilibrium between the splendour of art and nature?

Thanks to Pope Francis this dream came true. The tour will start from the Barberini Garden, the most accessible and also the least known. Visitors entering the villa, which belonged to the Barberini family before passing to the Holy See by the concordat of 1929, will have the chance to admire extraordinarily evocative natural and archaeological contexts: from the Magnolia Garden to the Path of Roses, from the Path of aromatic Herbs to that of the Lilies, from the square of the holly oaks to the Belvedere Garden. Villa Barberini was built over the site of Emperor Domitian’s Villa, thus visitors may discover the romantic ruins of the imperial Theatre or the crypto-portico. Looking out over the Piazzale Quadrato or the Belvedere Gardens, you will enjoy an amazing view of all of Latium, extending out to the blue line of the sea. You will then visit some rooms of the Apostolic Palace, or Papal Palace, according to the hierarchical structure of the Seconda Loggia of the Apostolic Palace.
The Vatican properties of Castel Gandolfo include the Papal Palace (comprising also the Specola, the Vatican Observatory), the Barberini Palace, apartment housing for 21 employees, an electrical plant, offices, farm buildings and animal stables. Also contained in the villas are buildings in the Villa Cybo set aside for the religious community of the Maestre Pie Filippini and their school, and two cloistered convents housing the Poor Clare and Basilian Nuns. In the square in front of the Papal Palace, the parish house assigned to the Salesians stands alongside the Pontifical Church of St Thomas of Villanova.