First women hired for St. Peter Basilica’s ‘Sanpietrini’ maintenance crew

Statue of St. Peter in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Jul 15, 2024 / 12:45 pm (CNA).

The Vatican has said that two women have been hired for the specialized maintenance crew of St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time in its 500-year history.

While women have worked for the Fabbrica di San Pietro — the department that oversees maintenance, restoration, and repairs of the Vatican’s papal basilica — before, it is the first time women are officially part of the “Sanpietrini” maintenance staff, according to Vatican News.

Two teams of Sanpietrini “work simultaneously on a daily basis to fulfill their principal tasks of reception, stewardship, cleaning, and maintenance of the Vatican Basilica and its facilities respectively,” the basilica’s website says.

The two Italian women, 21 and 26 years of age, studied masonry and decorative and ornamental plastering at the basilica’s newly relaunched School of Fine Arts and Traditional Trades.

The Vatican basilica’s art and trades school started in 2022 to train up new laborers in artisanal artistic skills. The courses and room and board are offered to students without cost.

Father Enzo Fortunato, communications director for St. Peter’s Basilica, said the presence of women in the Fabbrica is not entirely new — there were women mosaic artists who worked in the Vatican’s mosaic studio for many years — but their entrance in the Sanpietrini corps is a novelty.

According to Vatican News, in the 1500s, some women and orphans who inherited family businesses from their deceased husbands or fathers were also employed by the Fabbrica under the same conditions as the deceased, male breadwinner.

In the past 500 years, other women in the artistic trades were also hired by the Fabbrica, which was founded with the laying of the foundation stone of St. Peter’s Basilica on April 18, 1506. 

The maintenance crew takes its name from “sanpietrini,” also spelled “sampietrini,” the Italian name for the small, square stones that pave St. Peter’s Square and other historic streets in the center of Rome.