The Carriage Pavilion, from gala coach to popemobile

The Carriage Pavilion is the room people find hardest to square with their idea of the Vatican Museums. After Laocoön and frescoes, you go down to the basement and meet life-size horses, gilded coaches, 1930s limousines and the pope’s white off-roader. I find it one of the most candid stops in the museums, because it shows without fuss how a sovereign who was a king until 1870 lived and travelled. Here’s what to look for and how to add it to my route through the Vatican Museums.

When the pope travelled by coach

Paul VI opened the pavilion on 19 April 1973, and its heart is the Grand Gala Berlin. Leo XII had it built between 1824 and 1826 and Gregory XVI altered it heavily, and both men’s arms show on the carved back and on the tiara held by a cherub. The gilded bronzework is by Felice Eugeni, who wrote «Roma 1826» at the foot of the allegory of Faith. It came out for the Annunciation, St Philip Neri, the Nativity of the Virgin, St Charles Borromeo and whenever a new pope took possession of the Lateran.

Around it stand nine ceremonial berlins. Cardinal Lucien Louis Bonaparte’s was a gift from his cousin Napoleon III in 1868, and on the cardinal’s death it passed to Leo XIII, who kept the imperial eagle. There are also two travelling coaches with serious history. One was given by Ferdinand II of Naples to Pius IX for his return to Rome in 1850, after the pope had fled by night dressed as an ordinary priest in 1848. The other, by tradition, carried him in 1857 on the last tour a pope-king made of his own lands.

From coach to motor car

The first car arrived shortly after Pius XI’s pontificate began, a gift from the Catholic women of Milan. After the Lateran Pacts of 1929, the carmakers fell over each other to give him their best. The Graham Paige 837 is the car in which Pius XI rode to the Lateran on 22 December 1929, the first time a pope had left the Vatican since 1870, and Pius XII used it to reach San Lorenzo after the 1943 bombing. The Mercedes 460 Nürburg was designed by Ferdinand Porsche. And the Citroën Lictoria C6 is my favourite for sheer absurdity, a Venetian drawing room with a throne on wheels, so over the top that it never went into service.

Which popemobiles can you see?

According to the museums, the word popemobile goes back to a white off-roader that appeared after the 1976 Jubilee. The Toyota Land Cruiser from that year is here, and then the story turns serious. The Fiat Campagnola given to John Paul II in 1980 is the vehicle in which Mehmet Ali Ağca shot him twice on 13 May 1981 in St Peter’s Square. Convinced that Our Lady of Fátima had saved him, the pope had the bullet set into her statue’s crown. Armoured versions followed, a Land Rover Santana built in Linares in 1983 and a Mercedes 230 GE from 1990.

Then there’s the Renault 4. A priest in a working-class district of Verona drove it 300,000 km visiting his parishioners and gave it to Pope Francis on 7 September 2013. For me it sums up the whole pavilion, from gilded coach to four-speed runabout under one roof. Look out too for the steering wheel from Michael Schumacher’s 2003 Ferrari, presented to Benedict XVI in December 2005, which the pope compared to the complexity of steering the Church.

How to fit it in

The map gives it number 22, in the basement, on the same level as the Anima Mundi ethnological museum. Fifteen minutes is about right, and I’d slot it in after the Vatican Pinacoteca, which is in the same area, before heading up to the galleries. The Caffetteria Le Carrozze by the exit looks out over the Pinacoteca. If you’re bringing children, it’s in my ranking for the Vatican with kids.