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Pope Leo XIV welcomed U.S. singer-songwriter and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Bob Dylan to the Apostolic Palace, the papal residence at the Vatican, on Wednesday, as the musician made a stop in Rome on his Italian tour, Vatican News reported.
The brief private audience included greetings, a conversation and an exchange of gifts, according to the Vatican’s official news outlet.
Leo presented Dylan with a rosary, a string of prayer beads used in Catholic worship, while the 85-year-old musician gave the pontiff a signed copy of his autobiography, "Chronicles: Volume One."
Photographs released by Vatican Media showed the Chicago-born pope, dressed in his customary white cassock, shaking hands with Dylan, who wore a black hooded sweatshirt, coat and gloves.
Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the U.S. state of Minnesota, was in Rome for a scheduled Thursday performance at the Palazzo dello Sport, an indoor arena in the city.
The concert is part of the autumn European leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which also includes stops in Milan and Bologna.
Leo had previously drawn on Dylan’s work in his writings.
In July, the pope quoted a line from Dylan’s 1963 anti-nuclear piece Go Away You Bomb in the preface to Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, a book published by the Vatican Publishing House.
“I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled,” Leo quoted while warning against global rearmament and the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
Dylan wrote the piece at the height of the Cold War, the decadeslong standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it was never officially recorded or included on an album. Its typewritten manuscript remained unpublished until it was discovered in 2013.
Wednesday’s audience marked Dylan’s second meeting with a pope. In 1997, he performed before Pope John Paul II and around 300,000 young people attending the 23rd National Eucharistic Congress, a Catholic gathering, in Bologna.
Dylan performed several songs, including "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door," before greeting John Paul II onstage.
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