In the 15th century, the popes decided Rome needed to look like the capital of Christendom.
They brought in the greatest artists and architects of the age — Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo — and set them to work rebuilding the city.
The old St Peter's Basilica, already a thousand years old, was torn down.
What replaced it would take over a century to build and become the largest church in the world.
Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, lying on his back on a scaffold, largely alone.
He was a sculptor who had never done a large fresco before.
The Pope kept asking when it would be finished.
Michelangelo kept telling him when it was done.
It remains the most celebrated painted ceiling in existence.
Then, in 1527, disaster.
The troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V — unpaid, mutinous, and beyond control — sacked Rome.
They killed thousands, looted the Vatican, stabled horses in the Raphael rooms, and melted down centuries of art for coin.
The Renaissance in Rome was effectively over.
The artists fled.
The city took a generation to recover.
Fun fact: Michelangelo was so traumatised by the Sack of Rome that he returned to Florence and never lived in Rome again for many years.
He was eventually lured back by Pope Paul III, who gave him the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel's altar wall — The Last Judgement — and the commission to complete St Peter's.
He was working on the dome's design when he died, aged 88.
