CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy — Pope Leo XIV arrived in the papal summer retreat of Castel Gandolfo on Sunday to start a six-week vacation, giving the hilltop town back its most illustrious resident after Pope Francis stayed away during his 12-year pontificate.
Leo greeted well-wishers who lined the main road into town to welcome him before waving from the balcony of the villa where he will be staying for what he says will be a “brief period of rest.”
“I hope everyone can have some vacation time to restore the body and spirit,” Leo said before leaving the Vatican during his noontime prayer Sunday.
The 69-year-old Chicago native is resuming the papal tradition of leaving the Vatican for the hot summer months in favor of the relatively cooler climes of Castel Gandolfo, overlooking Lake Alban in the hills south of Rome. The area has been a favorite getaway for Roman rulers since the time of the Emperor Domitian in the first century.
It’s Leo’s first break after a frenetic few weeks of inaugural audiences, outings and Holy Year celebrations following his May 8 election as history’s first American pope. He’ll have a handful of public events while on holiday — Masses, Sunday noon prayers and even some events back at the Vatican — but officials expect he will use the time to rest, think and read in on key issues facing his new pontificate.
“Since he was elected he has been working, working, working. It is time for him to get more energy and get strength for his mission,” said Sister Mary Livia, a nun from Uganda who was on hand to welcome Leo on Sunday.
Pope Urban VIII built the papal palace in Castel Gandolfo in 1624 to give popes an escape from Rome. It was enlarged over succeeding pontificates to its present size of 55 hectares (136 acres), bigger than Vatican City itself. On the grounds are a working farm, manicured gardens, an observatory run by Jesuit astronomers and, more recently, an environmental educational center inspired by Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si (Praised Be).
Past popes used it regularly in summer, drawing huge crowds of pilgrims who would come on Sundays to hear his noon blessing, which was delivered inside the inner courtyard of the palace. Pope Benedict XVI famously closed out his papacy in the estate on Feb. 28, 2013. But Francis, a homebody who never took a proper vacation during his 12-year pontificate, decided to remain in Rome in summer.
The town suffered an initial economic hit from the decision. But then Francis turned the papal palace and gardens into a year-round museum, open to the public, giving the town a year-round tourist draw that ended up benefiting it even more, shopkeepers say.
“He made access to these structures possible, which no pope ever did in 400 years,” said Simone Mariani, who runs a restaurant in town that benefited from the steady flow of tourists much more than the summer-only Sunday crowds of the past. “He brought tourism that was good for the whole town.”
But that still didn’t make up for the abandonment felt by a town whose rhythms for generations revolved around regular papal visits.
Whenever the pope would arrive, the palace doors would open, the Swiss Guards would stand at attention and the town would come to life, said Patrizia Gasperini, whose family runs a souvenir shop on the main piazza a few steps from the palace front door.
“All year, we’d miss the color, the movement, but we knew when summer came he would return,” she said. “So when Pope Francis decided not to come, we were upset on an emotional level, beyond the economic level.”
Since the palace has been turned into a museum, Leo will actually be staying in the Villa Barberini, a smaller residence on the estate grounds that used to be where the Vatican secretary of state would stay when the pope was in town.
Mayor Alberto De Angelis said he hopes Leo will decide to use Castel Gandolfo not just for summer breaks, but for periodic vacations during the rest of the year, as St. John Paul II often did.
There is also a tradition of popes using their time at Castel Gandolfo to draft important church documents and encyclicals, and De Angelis said he hopes Leo follows in that tradition.
“We hope Pope Leo produces some text, some encyclical here that has a global reach,” he said. “And then he can say that it came from Castel Gandolfo, that he was inspired and produced this text from here for the whole world.”
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Winfield reported from Rome.
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