Pope Francis took a rare private trip from the Vatican to visit his local record shop

On Tuesday (January 11) Pope Francis was spotted by Javier Martinez-Brocal, director of the Rome Reports news agency, heading into Stereosound – a CD and vinyl store in Rome.

He’d stopped by to bless the recently renovated store, which he apparently frequented before the beginning of his papacy in 2013.

“He was here for maybe 20 minutes, just time for us to have a chat. It was an honour, very emotional. He is a great person, a simple man but marvellous,” Tiziana Esposito, one of the owners of the shop, told The Telegraph.

“He used to come here before he became Pope, when he was the archbishop of Buenos Aires and visiting Rome. This time we gave him a present, a CD, but I’m not telling anyone what it was.”

Apparently The Pope’s previous private trips outside the Vatican included a visit to an optician to change his glasses in 2015. The following year he went to a shop to buy some new orthopaedic shoes.

Pope Francis has previously said: “Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ from his Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler.

“And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the ‘Erbarme Dich,’ the tears of Peter in the St. Matthew Passion. Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time.”

Pope Francis even put out his own album, ‘Wake Up’, in 2015.