Two women have been hired for the specialised maintenance crew of St Peter’s Basilica for the first time in its 500-year history. Source: CNA.
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 fulfil 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, aged 21 and 26 years, 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 new workers in artisanal artistic skills. The courses and room and board are offered to students without cost.
Fr 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.
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First women hired for St Peter Basilica’s ‘Sanpietrini’ maintenance crew (By Hannah Brockhaus, CNA)
