Long life | 3 November 2016

For almost 400 years, since it was built on the orders of Pope Urban VIII in the 17th century, the grand Apostolic Palace at Castel Gandolfo on a lake in the Alban Hills south of Rome has been the place where popes have retreated to get away from the city’s summer heat. John Paul II liked it so much that he built a swimming-pool there, and his successor, Benedict XVI, was almost as fond of it. But Pope Francis, who avoids all forms of ostentation, has never stayed there: he finds it too grandiose. And now he has thrown it open to the public as a museum, meaning it will probably never again be used as a private papal residence.

For the public the main attraction is the pope’s bedroom, where 40 children were born in the papal bed when Pius XII, the wartime pontiff, let it be used as a delivery room when the area was engulfed by fighting between the Allies and the occupying Germans in 1944; and it was also here that Pius himself died in 1958 in the most distressing circumstances.