The Vatican Museums are an enormous treasure chest containing thousands of priceless treasures: visiting them is an unmissable experience, a memorable full immersion in human history and the highest artistic expressions ever produced.
The uniqueness of the Vatican Museums
Among the countless extraordinary museums that Rome offers its visitors, the Vatican Museums, bordered by the Borgo district and the Prati district, occupy an exceptional place. What makes this incredible museum complex unique are not only the thousands of works that populate its collections and the many museums that comprise it, but above all are the unparalleled masterpieces that, starting in the 15th century, were executed in the papal palaces by the likes of Beato Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael and Michelangelo.
Ready? Here we go!
Let’s begin our journey to discover the Vatican Museums with a curiosity: the entrance to the Museums is located in the municipal territory of Rome, but all the buildings of this true artistic and religious citadel, rise on Vatican territory. Rest assured: no one will ask you for your passport at the entrance, but if during your visit you would like to send someone a postcard from the smallest state in the world, you could take advantage of the characteristic vintage mailboxes located in various areas of the Museums.
Some numbers
The Vatican Museums have more than 50 areas including museums, collections, halls, apartments, chapels and exhibition spaces created by the initiative of all the successive pontiffs over 8 centuries of history. The museum itinerary stretches for 7 km, along which 20,000 works of the approximately 70,000 that make up the artistic heritage of the Vatican Museums are displayed.
Therefore, do not delude yourself that you can admire all the treasures offered by this museum complex in a single visit. Unless you want to devote at least a couple of days to the Vatican Museums, you will inevitably have to choose which works to see in order to appreciate them as they deserve and avoid devastating indigestion of masterpieces.
Also be prepared for a visit that won’t exactly be solo: in 2023 the Vatican Museums recorded 6,800,000 admissions, averaging more than 21,000 per day!
A bit of history
Created with the intention of displaying classical sculptures to be preserved and handed down to the honor and splendor of the Church, the Vatican Museums began to house the first nucleus of statues in 1506 at the behest of Pope Julius II. It was thanks to this pontiff that Raphael and Michelangelo made their entrance into the Vatican, the former to create the frescoes in the Stanze the latter to decorate the vault of the Sistine Chapel. It would have to wait, however, until the 18th century and the initiative of Clement XIV and Pius VI for the popes’ artistic collections to be ordered in special buildings and opened to the public. Between new constructions, expansions and restorations, the spaces of the Vatican Museums have continued, and continue today, to change to offer visitors an unforgettable experience.
The 7 Wonders of the Vatican Museums
Given the exceptional amount of exhibits in the Vatican Museums, from prehistoric artifacts to Egyptian artifacts, from classical statues to modern and contemporary art, from tapestries to silverware, from carriages to papal cars, we have selected the 7 wonders that absolutely must-see.
1. The Borgia apartment
Consisting of six rooms housing part of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art and some rooms not accessible to the public, the apartment was created for Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), who entrusted its decoration to Pinturicchio, who had already worked in the Sistine Chapel. The six rooms that can be visited, dedicated to the Sibyls, the Creed, the Liberal Arts, the Saints, the Mysteries, and the Pontiffs, house works by Gauguin, Chagall, Klee, and Kandinsky and have vaults and lunettes preciously decorated with extensive use of gold. Pinturicchio’s work must have been greatly appreciated since the pope, a few years later, entrusted him with another cycle of frescoes, unfortunately lost, for Castel Sant’Angelo.
2. The Rooms of Raphael
Despite the beauty of the Borgia apartment, Julius II, elected pope in 1503, refused to live in his predecessor’s house and chose the second floor of the Papal Palace as his residence. The pope’s rooms were beautifully frescoed by Raphael and his pupils between 1508 and 1524. The Stanza della Segnatura, the Stanza di Eliodoro, the Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo, and the Sala di Costantino are absolute masterpieces of Renaissance art that profoundly influenced artists of later eras. Take time to observe the complexity of the compositions, the perspectives, the characters populating the scenes, the minuteness of the portraits, the symbols, and the details. This way, if you are a rock fan, you will not miss the fact that a detail of the School of Athens was used by Guns N’ Roses for the cover of their famous album Use Your Illusion!
3. The Sistine Chapel
To respect the sacredness of the place where the conclave that elects the pope is still held today, absolute silence must be observed when visiting the Sistine Chapel. It is indeed difficult, however, to hold back exclamations of awe and wonder as soon as one sets foot in this majestic room, whose surface is entirely covered with paintings.
The extraordinary decorations of the walls and the vault were executed in several stages: the first, carried out under the pontificate of Pope Sixtus IV from whom the chapel takes its name, can be dated to 1481-82 and includes the frescoes of the plinth with mock tapestries, scenes from the life of Moses and the life of Christ, and the depiction of martyred pontiffs. The authors of these paintings are some of the most representative painters of the Italian Renaissance: Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Pinturicchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, and Luca Signorelli.
In the second phase Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the vault by Julius II. Buonarroti executed the frescoes depicting the Stories of Genesis, from the Creation to the Fall of Man, the Universal Flood and the subsequent rebirth of mankind with Noah’s family, at two different times, between 1508 and 1512, and was also the author of the 14 lunettes and sails in which he depicted the ancestors of Christ. In every inch of the decoration, Michelangelo’s talent is very evident: in the painted scenes, the figures often assume contorted poses, which highlight and emphasize their powerful musculatures, emphasized by the use of bright, iridescent colors. The beauty of the vault, at the center of which is the Creation of Adam, surely among the most famous and quoted (and parodied) works in the history of art, is truly magnetic: one would stare at it for hours, or at least as long as one’s neck permits!
The years between 1536 and 1541 are those of the last phase, when Michelangelo, by now an old man, at the behest of Clement VII created a grandiose fresco to decorate the wall behind the altar: the Last Judgment. The scene exudes a rare and powerful force, thanks to the marvelous blue of the background and the movement that begins with the gesture of Christ, the fulcrum of the composition, around which the resurrected recover their bodies to ascend to heaven and the damned are thrown into hell by angels and demons. The fresco measures 180 square meters and has about 400 figures, some monumental, others much smaller: a small pair of binoculars might be useful to be able to catch the details and expressive intensity of all the characters that populate this masterpiece.
4. The Hall of the Chiaroscuri
In this room, also known as the Hall of the Palafrenieri (those who carried the pope’s gestatorial chair on their shoulders) or the Hall of the Parrot, you can admire a wooden coffered ceiling made to a design by Raphael and figures of saints and apostles executed with the chiaroscuro technique by Sanzio in 1517-18 at the behest of Pope Leo X. Following severe damage to the decoration, the chiaroscuro was repainted by the Zuccari brothers during the pontificate of Gregory XIII (1572-85).
5. The Gallery of Maps
At the heart of the Vatican Museums, this wide, 120-meter-long corridor provides an extraordinary journey into the Italy of 450 years ago. In the Gallery of Maps, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII and inaugurated in 1581, the entire peninsula is recreated to scale, thanks to 40 maps executed by painters, both Italian and Flemish. The pope’s intent was to enjoy the beauty of the Bel Paese without leaving the Apostolic Palaces. On one side we admire the Italian regions of the Adriatic coast and on the other those bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea. The maps contain not only depictions of the cities, towns, mountains, rivers and other physical features of the territories, but also the historical events that took place in those places. Walking through this beautiful gallery, Italian visitors can have fun identifying their country of origin. Note how at the time the maps were made, the practice of orienting maps to the north had not yet come into effect, so some Italian regions appear upside down.
6. The Picture Gallery
The picture gallery of the Vatican Museums, divided into 18 rooms divided chronologically by pictorial schools from the 12th to the 19th century, has about 460 works and houses paintings by the greatest Italian masters, including Giotto, Beato Angelico, Melozzo da Forlì, Perugino, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Veronese and Caravaggio. One of the most distinctive paintings in the picture gallery is Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise, painted by an Austrian painter unknown to most, Wenzel Peter, who showed great skill in this large canvas, depicting more than two hundred animals in detail and accuracy.
7. The double-ramp helical staircase
At the end of the visit, to exit the Vatican Museums you will have to walk down a beautiful staircase, among the most photographed in the world. Commissioned in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, it was built by engineer and architect Giuseppe Momo, who had already designed a number of Vatican buildings. Momo’s work, inspired by the “snail” staircase that Donato Bramante had executed more than 400 years earlier in the Cortile del Belvedere (belonging to the Vatican museum complex), has a double helical ramp and a glass roof. This ingenious solution, which allowed the flow of incoming and outgoing visitors to never meet, was a model for the New York museum of MOMA, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
It is useful to know that
- On the last Sunday of every month, the Vatican Museums are open and free.
On their website (Click Here) you will find everything you need to plan your visit-don’t forget to check it out! - There are plenty of agencies that organize guided and “skip-the-line” tours: relying on an experienced guide can help you get your bearings better and learn more about what you are admiring.
- The Vatican Museums are perfectly equipped to accommodate families with children of all ages: if you are traveling with strollers in tow, you will find dedicated elevators, areas with changing tables and areas where breastfeeding is allowed. School-age children, on the other hand, thanks to an audio guide designed for them, will take an exciting and adventurous tour, accompanied by incredible characters, in search of some of the treasures scattered throughout the museums.
- After the entrance ticket, the most important thing to have with you during your visit… is a pair of comfortable shoes on your feet!
