Rome After the Jubilee: What the Holy Year Left Behind

On 6 January 2026 Leo XIV closed the Holy Door of St Peter's and the Jubilee of 2025 was over. Across the year 33,475,369 pilgrims came to Rome. The figure is exact; somebody counted.

What follows is the part nobody writes about. The Jubilee was not only a year but a decade of preparation, and everything built for it stayed in the city. Meanwhile there will be no occasion to gather thirty-three million people in one place again for another seven years.

What Exactly Has Ended

The Holy Year was proclaimed by Pope Francis, who opened the door on Christmas Eve 2024. It fell to Leo XIV to close it: Francis died in April 2025 and is buried in Santa Maria Maggiore.

The doors of the four papal basilicas were shut in sequence. Santa Maria Maggiore on Christmas Day, San Giovanni in Laterano on 27 December, San Paolo fuori le Mura the day after, St Peter's on 6 January. The most crowded event of the whole year was the August youth gathering, more than a million people at once.

There was also a fifth door, something never done before: Francis opened one in the chapel of the Rebibbia prison in Rome.

Bricked Up Until 2033

A Holy Door is not a metaphor. Between Jubilees it is walled up, and the bronze leaves you see from the square stand in front of the brickwork.

The next opening is set for 2033, for the Extraordinary Jubilee of the Redemption, two thousand years from the death of Christ. The mechanism that brings tens of millions of people to Rome has been switched off for seven years, and that was confirmed from the pulpit on the day of the closing.

For a visitor the conclusion is simple. The Rome of the next few years is a Rome prepared for a peak year, without the peak year.

What a Holy Door Actually Is

Worth pausing here, because the detail is a good one and almost nobody knows it.

The ritual took its present form by 1500, under Alexander VI Borgia. Before that there were no bronze leaves at all: the Jubilee door was a bricked-up opening, broken through for the Holy Year and walled up again afterwards. The leaves you see today were all made in the twentieth century.

The mechanics have not changed since. Between Jubilees there is masonry behind the bronze, and when the news says the door has been closed, the masonry is what it means.

The façade of St Peter's carries five bronze doors. The Holy Door is the one furthest right. The central pair was made by Antonio Filarete in 1455, and the one on the far left is the Door of Death, made by Giacomo Manzù in 1964, through which the coffins of dead popes are carried out. Stand in front of the façade for a minute knowing that, and it stops being a backdrop for a photograph.

What Was Built and Not Taken Away

The list is long, and all of it is still there.

Piazza Pia. The ground between Castel Sant'Angelo and the Via della Conciliazione was rebuilt and handed to pedestrians, creating the largest pedestrian area in the city. The walk from the Tiber to the basilica stopped being a dash across traffic and became a walk.

Line C. The Colosseo/Fori Imperiali and Porta Metronia stations opened on 16 December 2025 after twelve years of work. They are at once a transport fix and two publicly accessible archaeological spaces: imperial baths were found beneath the Fori Imperiali, a second-century military barracks beneath Porta Metronia. There is a fuller account here.

Vatican restorations. The Hall of Constantine, frescoed by Giulio Romano, reopened after restoration in 2025, and tour groups still walk past it because everyone is heading for the four Raphael Rooms. In February and March 2026 the Vatican Museums cleaned the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the first intervention on it in more than thirty years.

City excavations. From 7 June 2026 nine archaeological sites across Rome, put in order under the national recovery programme, opened to the public on a calendar of free guided visits.

Santa Maria Maggiore deserves a separate mention. The basilica is free, it stands ten minutes from Termini, and since April 2025 it holds the tomb of Francis. The people going there now are not tourists, and you feel the difference at the door.

What It Changes About a Trip

Three things, in descending order of usefulness.

First, infrastructure sized for a Jubilee crowd is now serving an ordinary one. The new pedestrian links, the new metro interchange, the cleaned fountains and washed façades have not gone anywhere, while the load on them has returned to normal.

Second, the Vatican still needs planning exactly as before, which means booking and booking early. A quieter city does not change the fact that the Vatican Museums remain the most visited interior in Italy, and the queue without a ticket holds up in an ordinary year too.

Third, and this one is about the calendar. The next structural surge in Rome is set for 2033, and the city has already begun preparing: regional authorities are talking publicly about planning well ahead. Which means that from about 2031 Rome will move back into a phase of building sites and scaffolding. The gap between the two is now.

The Four Basilicas as a Route

The doors are sealed, but the basilicas are still there, and without the Jubilee crowd they read for the first time in a year as a single thing.

There are four: St Peter's, San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore and San Paolo fuori le Mura. All four are free to enter. They were spread across the city deliberately, and a pilgrim walked between them, covering most of Rome diagonally in a day.

San Giovanni is not merely a basilica but the cathedral of Rome and the oldest of the four: the Bishop of Rome, which is to say the pope, has his seat there rather than in the Vatican. Santa Maria Maggiore is now also where people come to Francis. San Paolo stands furthest out, beyond the city wall, which is exactly why it is always quiet.

Walking all four in a day is physically possible, and until recently tens of thousands of people were doing it daily. The same route is now walked alone.

Where to Go Right Now

If you were last in Rome before 2024, three places have changed enough to be worth seeing again: Piazza Pia and the approach to the basilica, the Colosseo/Fori Imperiali station with its excavation inside, and the Sistine Chapel after the cleaning.

If you have never been, reverse the order: do ordinary Rome, and the list above will fold into the route by itself, because all of it sits exactly where you were going to walk anyway. That was the point of building it.

The whole city, on the map ItaGuide. Open City map of Rome.