Vatican Museums Tour & Sistine Chapel with Guide

Take a stroll through The Vatican museums that embrace about 70,000 works of art that are by all means one of the largest museum complexes in the world. After a brief introduction in the courtyard of the Pigna, we visit the Belvedere Palace where the Popes in the early 1500s exhibited the first collection of ancient statues. Masterpieces such as the Laocoon and the Belvedere Torso, impressive for their realism and anatomical details, have been admired and studied by Michelangelo, not surprisingly called “the
student of the Torso”. The path then winds on the second floor through the galleries of candelabra, tapestries and geographical maps that lead to the rooms decorated by Raphael and his aides in the apartment of the “Terrible” Pope Julius II of the Rovere family. At the end of the path you enter the Sistine Chapel, the sacred place where the Popes are elected.

Here the strength and energy of Michelangelo in the fresco on the vault and the Last Judgment compete with the grace of the stories painted on the walls by Perugino, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio.