There's a piece of trivia most Catholics don't know: the ground St. Peter's Basilica is built on used to be a racetrack.
Not metaphorically. An actual chariot-racing track. The Circus of Nero sat on Vatican Hill right where the piazza is today. If you were standing in St. Peter's Square in 64 AD, you'd be watching horses go around an oval, not pilgrims taking photos.
Caligula built it. Nero inherited it and opened it to the public. Private track on imperial grounds, close to half a kilometer long. The emperors used it like a backyard.
The big Egyptian obelisk at the center of the square today? That was on the spina, the center divider of the track. Caligula had it shipped from Alexandria on a purpose-built barge, ballasted with enough lentils to feed a city. He planted it at the center of his circus because he could. It's the only ancient obelisk in Rome that never fell. It just sat there watching everything for two thousand years.
In the summer of 64 AD, Rome burned. Big fire, six days, a significant chunk of the city gone. Nero was at his beach house when it happened, which looked bad given that he immediately started building a palace complex over the burned land. The rumors went straight to him.
He needed a scapegoat. He picked the Christians.
Tacitus wrote it down decades later in plain terms. The Christians were arrested and convicted not for the fire but, in his words, for "hatred of mankind." Then they were killed in ways designed to entertain: wrapped in animal skins and thrown to dogs, nailed to crosses, lit on fire at night so the gardens stayed lit after dark. Nero, Tacitus says, watched from the circus in a charioteer's costume, mixing with the crowd.
The emperor of Rome dressed as a racing driver and watched Christians burn on his private track.
Peter died there. Or near there — the exact spot is still debated, but every early source puts it somewhere on Vatican Hill during Nero's reign. Crucified upside down at his own request, on the grounds that he wasn't worthy to die the same way as Christ. Clement of Rome, who knew people who were alive for it, wrote about it within a generation. Tertullian confirmed it. Jerome placed the burial close by, in the Vatican, near the Triumphal Way.
His followers buried him and kept marking the spot. Graffiti scratched into the plaster walls nearby. One of them carved three Greek letters about six inches from where they believed his bones were, sometime around 160 AD: Petros eni. Peter is here. When excavators found it in the 1950s, under everything built on top of it over the centuries, it was still there.
Constantine knew where the tomb was. When he got his chance in the fourth century, he leveled the slope of Vatican Hill and built his basilica with the altar positioned directly over the grave. The current basilica, started in 1506, is on the same axis. The Bernini canopy inside hangs directly above it. Stand under it and you're standing above Peter, a few hundred meters from where Nero ran his races.
In 1586, a pope ordered the old circus obelisk moved to the front of the new basilica. Moving a 320-ton granite shaft across town meant months of preparation, hundreds of workers, horses, and a papal decree of silence during the raising, under penalty of death. When the ropes started smoking from the strain and a sailor broke the silence to yell "Water on the ropes," the pope pardoned him on the spot and gave his family the permanent right to supply the palm fronds for Palm Sunday. That family, from a coastal town called Bordighera, has been doing it ever since.
Sixtus put a cross on top of the obelisk. Then had carved into its base: "Behold the Cross of the Lord; flee, hostile powers. The Lion of the Tribe of Judah has conquered."
The obelisk that watched Peter die is now a public exorcism in the middle of St. Peter's Square.
Nero's whole system ran on spectacle. Keep people entertained, keep them distracted, give them something to watch. The circus wasn't just recreation — it was how you stayed in power. Christians dying on Vatican Hill were part of that program. The emperor watched in racing gear.
The track is gone. The empire is gone. What's left is a white Mercedes G-Class with a custom open top doing laps in a square built over the grave of the man Nero killed there. On the side of the Popemobile, on the back of this shirt: "I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."
Nero built his circus on the banks of the Tiber. Vatican City Racing is what came after 🏁
