Lentorama 2026: Hic es: aedificia Vaticani

Day 14 - Torre del Gallinari

Also known as the Gallinarium tower or the Gallinaro Tower, there's not a lot of information out there about this tower, which is found in the Vatican Gardens in the northeast of the city state. It was apparently built for Pope Innocent VIII in the 15th century during work done to walls and other structures to the north of the Apostolic Palaces.

Pius XI used it as a botanical "garden," but I'm not sure what that means as the best source I could find on the tower is in Italian, and I'm working off of an English abstract. The abstract does note that the tower isn't listed in contemporaneous sources, and is hard to pick out in representations of the walls from the period.  So the lack of easy information in English is not surprising.

You'll see the tower in the Vatican Gardens today, and it does feature among some of the public tours.