Visiting Rome After the Jubilee: Your 2026 Travel Guide

The Holy Doors at St. Peter's are bricked shut again. They'll stay that way until 2033, when Pope Leo XIV has announced an Extraordinary Jubilee will reopen them. Pope Leo sealed the last one in early January 2026, and with that, the Jubilee Year that brought 33 million pilgrims through Rome is officially closed.

If you didn't get here in 2025, you might think you missed your chance. The opposite is true. The crowds have thinned, the construction sites have closed up, and the city has been quietly polished for the first time in decades. Rome in 2026 is the Rome that 2025's pilgrims wished they'd seen.

Here's what's changed, and why this might be the best year to visit since before the pandemic.

The numbers behind the Holy Year

The official Vatican count came in at 33,475,369 pilgrims across the Jubilee, from 185 countries. Italy, the United States and Spain led the origin list, with European pilgrims making up roughly 62% of the total. The Vatican held 35 major events during the year, from the Jubilee of Youth in August to the Jubilee of the Poor in November.

For context: a normal year in Rome sees around 12 million tourists. The 2025 Jubilee roughly tripled that. Hotel prices, restaurant waits, basilica queues, everything was stretched.

There's a historical footnote here that doesn't usually get attention. This was only the second Jubilee in history opened by one pope and closed by another. The first was in 1700, when Innocent XII opened the Holy Year and Clement XI closed it. Francis opened the 2025 Jubilee in December 2024; Leo XIV closed it in January 2026. A 325-year gap between occurrences. Make of it what you will.

What's changed physically in Rome

The Italian government allocated €1.725 billion for Jubilee-related infrastructure, with 332 projects across the city. By early 2026, 204 of those were either completed or substantially advanced. About 75% of the funding has been deployed.

This matters more than it sounds. Roman streetscape repairs typically move at glacial speed. The Jubilee deadline forced through work that would have taken twenty years under normal political conditions.

The area around Piazza Pia, between Castel Sant'Angelo and St. Peter's, is now a pedestrian zone with a new underpass routing traffic underground. The walk from the river to the basilica used to mean dodging four lanes of cars; now it's a continuous open space. The Termini station forecourt has been redone, the Metro Line C extension is operational deeper into the historic center, and dozens of churches have been cleaned of decades of pollution grime.

A few smaller pieces are still in progress (the Anagnina depot upgrade, parts of the secondary tram lines), but the public-facing stuff a visitor would notice is done. For a deeper walk-through of the refurbished streetscape, see our guide to walking the refurbished Rome.

One caveat worth knowing: not all of it is universally loved. Roman residents have complained about the rushed quality of some pedestrian-zone resurfacing, and the new traffic patterns near the Vatican have shifted congestion to other neighborhoods rather than eliminating it. If you stay east of the Tiber, you'll see less of the polish.

The Holy Doors: closed until 2033

The four major basilicas in Rome (St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul Outside the Walls) each have a Holy Door that opens only during a Jubilee. Pope Francis opened them in December 2024. They were resealed during the first week of January 2026.

If you're not Catholic, this might feel like a non-event. For pilgrims, walking through an open Holy Door was considered a path to a plenary indulgence: in the Catholic understanding, the remission of temporal punishment for sins already forgiven. That's the spiritual mechanic that drives Jubilee tourism.

The doors are now physically bricked up from the inside. You can still see them from outside; St. Peter's is the most visited, with the bronze panels by Vico Consorti commissioned for the 1950 Holy Year. For more on the four doors, our Holy Doors guide covers the history, the panels, and the quirk of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

The next ordinary Jubilee remains scheduled for 2050, but the wait is shorter than that. Pope Leo XIV announced in November 2025 that an Extraordinary Jubilee will be held in 2033 — the Holy Year of Redemption, marking the 2,000th anniversary of Christ's death and resurrection. Extraordinary Jubilees historically involve opening the Holy Doors (the 2015-2016 Jubilee of Mercy under Pope Francis did so), and the same is expected for 2033. See our 2033 Jubilee guide for the announcement details.

If walking through an open Holy Door was on your list, you missed the 2025 cycle, but there's now a known opportunity to do it again in 2033. The basilicas are also open year-round, and you can still see the doors from outside.

What you can still experience

Most of what makes Rome worth visiting has nothing to do with the Jubilee calendar.

The four major basilicas are open and free. St. Peter's is the obvious one. St. Mary Major has become significantly more visited since Pope Francis was buried there in April 2025, the first pope laid to rest outside the Vatican in over a century. His tomb is a simple marble slab inscribed only with "Franciscus" in Latin. The basilica also holds the icon of Salus Populi Romani, which Francis personally venerated throughout his pontificate. Admission is free. If you're planning a Vatican day, this is the natural complement: skip-the-line tour of the Vatican Museums in the morning, lunch, then St. Mary Major in the afternoon for the tomb visit.

The Vatican Museums themselves are running normally. Booking a skip-the-line tour is basically required during peak season; the standalone lines can run two hours even off-peak. Our 2026 Vatican Museums visitor guide covers booking strategy month by month.

The Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment was cleaned in February-March 2026. The whitish patina that had built up since the 1994 restoration has been removed, and the colors are noticeably more vibrant than they were last year. If you visited before March 2026, the fresco you'll see now is meaningfully different.

The Hall of Constantine reopened in mid-2025 after its own restoration, and the result is striking. The Giulio Romano frescoes had been darkening for centuries; they're now closer to their original color palette than at any point in living memory. Most tour groups still skip it because the four Raphael Rooms get the attention. Worth a detour.

Why 2026 is a better year than 2025 to visit

Three reasons, in order of how much they actually matter.

First, the crowds. The post-Jubilee dropoff is real and measurable. January and February 2026 visitor numbers at the Vatican Museums are running roughly 30% below the same months in 2025. Hotel rates have softened, not crashed, but the Jubilee-year premium is gone. Restaurants near the Vatican have stopped requiring reservations a week out.

Second, the infrastructure. Most of those 332 projects were either invisible during 2025 because they were active construction sites pilgrims had to walk around, or untested. By 2026, the work is finished and the city has had time to break it in. The new pedestrian zones, the cleaned facades, the resurfaced piazzas: all of it is in use and settled.

Third, and this one is contrarian: the spiritual energy is gone, and for most travelers, that's a feature. Jubilee Rome in 2025 was a religious event. The basilicas were packed with prayer groups, the queues for confession ran into the evening, every café near St. Peter's had pilgrim badges hanging from chair backs. If you came for the art, the food, the history, the Catholicism was unavoidable. In 2026 the basilicas go back to being beautiful buildings you can wander through quietly. Rome reverts to being Rome.

The flip side: if you wanted the spiritual atmosphere, you missed it. The 2033 Extraordinary Jubilee will bring some of it back, but the focus there is Jerusalem and the Holy Land as much as Rome.

Practical tips for visiting in 2026

Booking windows have widened. For the Vatican Museums, you can now reasonably book a slot two to three weeks ahead during shoulder seasons (March-April, October-November). Summer still wants a month of lead time minimum.

Free admission to the Vatican Museums is the last Sunday of every month, but it's a brutal day to visit. The queues form before dawn and the galleries are uncomfortably full. Pay the entry fee and book skip-the-line if your time is worth more than €17.

The Vatican + St. Mary Major combo is a common itinerary for 2026 specifically because of the Francis tomb. The most practical version: morning Vatican tour, lunch in Borgo or Prati, afternoon transfer to Santa Maria Maggiore (Metro Line A to Termini, then a short walk). Some operators bundle both stops with a guide in a single half-day.

Best months: March (cool, low crowds, manageable rain), late October (warm enough, falling visitor counts), and the first half of November (the dropoff continues). Avoid August unless you have to. The heat is severe and many restaurants close.

Last note on Holy Door tourism. The bronze doors at St. Peter's are still worth a look from outside. The interior side, where the bricking is done, is not visible to the public; the doors face Vatican territory, not the basilica nave. If someone offers to "show you the Holy Door from inside" outside of a Jubilee year, they're lying or confused.

One last thing

If you're reading this in 2026, you have something most travelers to Rome don't get: a city that's just been refurbished, with the visitor surge already past, and seven years to plan around before the next Jubilee opens the doors again. By 2032 the polish will have faded back into Roman patina and the 2033 build-up will start to hit the booking windows. The window between these two events is genuinely open now and it isn't going to stay open for long.

For Vatican-specific planning, our pages on the Sistine Chapel and the main Vatican Museums cover the rest of what you'd need.