Bob Dylan’s Italian tour just picked up a Vatican detour. On Wednesday, the Nobel laureate met Pope Leo XIV privately at the Vatican, sandwiched between his Milan concert Monday and his Rome show Thursday. The gift exchange alone is worth the headline: Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography,“Chronicles: Volume One.”
The connection runs deeper than a photo op. Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, grew up with Dylan’s music, and Leo even quoted Dylan’s unpublished 1963 protest song“Go Away You Bomb”in his 2026 book on peace and disarmament. Dylan has long drawn on St. Augustine, the inspiration for Leo’s religious order, so the meeting had a genuine literary thread running through it.
This isn’t Dylan’s first papal audience either. He performed for Pope John Paul II in Bologna back in 1997, making Wednesday’s meeting a full-circle moment nearly three decades in the making. Vatican culture official Rev. Antonio Spadaro and L’Osservatore Romano editor Andrea Monda were both part of the story, and Vatican officials noted the pope’s lifelong fandom.
So here’s the question: if you could trade gifts with one legend, what would you hand them, and what would you want back?
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Local Lawton
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