Monday, the Vatican unveiled a stunning website that offers a virtual tour of the Lateran Basilica.

CNS has details:

The Vatican Web site celebrated the feast of the dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran by launching a virtual tour of the Rome church — thanks to Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

The virtual tour — giving cybernauts a high-resolution, 360-degree view of the basilica — went online at www.vatican.va Nov. 9, the feast of the dedication of the basilica, which is the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome.

Bryan Crable, chairman of the communication department at the Catholic university in Villanova, Pa., said the virtual tour of St. John’s — and earlier tours of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls — was the brainchild of Paul Wilson, a professor in the department.

 ”Although he proposed this idea two years ago, it took some time for it to become approved and for us to assemble the equipment necessary to carry out the project,” Crable said in an e-mail to Catholic News Service.

The equipment included digital cameras, computers, “cutting-edge software” and a very expensive “motorized rig, which can precisely regulate the movements of a camera” so that the more than 300 flat photographs overlap and can be edited into a video, Crable said.

And there are more tours to come:

The tour of St. John Lateran is only a small part of a monumental project in which a team of Villanova University professors and students photographed the Sistine Chapel, the newly resorted Pauline Chapel, the Basilica of St. Mary Major and the Necropolis of St. Rosa.

Check out the tour. It’s fascinating. (Not yet, it seems, in English, but you get the idea…)