The Graffiti Wall, on the north side of the Tropaion, showing the repository. Another set of bones had been discovered at the site, that Correnti now prepared to examine. Peter’s grave - were not the saint’s relics at all. The bones that had been the objects of hope for over a decade - the bones found in, or at least to the side of, St. The animal bones were not a great surprise: the ancient necropolis was known to have been near the emperor Nero’s circus and stables, and discarded animal carcasses may have left their bones strewn all throughout the area. The pile contained the bones of as many as four individuals: two men in their fifties, a man in his forties, and an elderly woman in her seventies, as well as an assortment of animal bones. In the end, his findings were disappointing: these were almost certainly not the bones of Peter. Correnti’s meticulous examination and testing took over four years. The hungry press, a curious academia, and the anxious Church widely wondered about their authenticity, and the frustration only built at the Vatican’s reticence and characteristic slowness.įinally, in 1956, at the request of Pope Pius XII, Venerando Correnti, a leading anthropologist and professor at Palermo University, examined the Red Wall bones. The pope had made only a brief, uncertain announcement concerning the bones in 1950. Only a cursory examination had been given to them by the pope’s private physician, who declared that they were the bones of a man in his seventies - the age Peter was expected to have been at his martyrdom. Peter’s grave, remained safely locked in lead-lined chests in the private chambers of the pope for over a decade. The bones the Vatican archaeologists had discovered in 1942, in the niche at the foundation of the Red Wall, to one side of St. The bones found beneath the Red Wall (briefly replaced there for the photograph).
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