The Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel

Getting there

The visitors' entrance is on viale Vaticano, on the north side of Vatican City, and it has nothing to do with St Peter's Square, which is on the other side.

• Metro line A, Ottaviano or Cipro stations, then a walk. There are also tram 19 and buses 49 (which stops right on the forecourt in front of the museums), 32, 81 and 982 at piazza del Risorgimento, 492 and 990 on via Leone IV
• The museums themselves advise against coming by car, and state that parking space in the area is limited. In a motorhome it is out of the question: this is central Rome, and the rule for the whole city applies, park the vehicle and take public transport
• Watch out for a known scam the Basilica's own website warns about: there is no such thing as a Vatican tax on public transport to and from St Peter's
• The only official site for tickets is tickets.museivaticani.va. The museums warn against domains that look like theirs and charge far higher prices
• Between the museum exit and St Peter's Square you walk along the walls for a good quarter of an hour: if you want to do everything in one day, allow for that stretch and a break in between

Practical information

Contacts

Where it is

Città del Vaticano

You set off from

Notes

• Opening hours, and pay attention because they have changed: Monday to Saturday the museums are open 8:00-20:00, with last admission at 18:00 and the rooms cleared half an hour before closing. Guides that say 9-18 are out of date, and the separate evening openings no longer exist: the ordinary timetable already runs that late. Closed on Sundays, except the last of the month, and on Vatican holidays (1 and 6 January, 11 February, 19 March, 6 April, 1 May, 29 June, 14 and 15 August, 8, 25 and 26 December)
• The last Sunday of the month admission is free, 9:00-14:00 with last admission at 12:30. There is no booking: you queue, and indeed on those dates the entry ticket simply does not appear on the portal. It does not apply if the date falls on Easter, 29 June, 25, 26 or 31 December
• Prices: 20 euros full, 10 reduced from 7 to 18 years old (and for university students up to 25), free under the age of 7, who do not even need to be counted in the booking. No reduction for the over 65s and no family rate: the one you read about on the site is for Castel Gandolfo. The booking surcharge is 5 euros per ticket and not per booking, so two adults and two teenagers go from 60 to 80 euros, a third more
• The ban on photography in the Sistine Chapel. The regulations say that, with the exception of the Sistine Chapel, you may take photographs "for strictly personal and domestic purposes"; inside the chapel taking photographs and filming with any kind of electronic device is forbidden, and using a mobile phone is forbidden too. Staff can ask you to delete on the spot whatever you have recorded. In St Peter's Basilica, on the other hand, you can take photographs, without flash
• How to dress. Shoulders and knees covered, no vest tops, no low necklines, no shorts above the knee, no miniskirts, and hats must come off. It applies to the museums, to the Sistine Chapel, to the Basilica and to the Gardens. The rule is written with no exception for age
• The cloakroom is free and takes rucksacks and bulky luggage, knives, scissors, umbrellas with a point, walking sticks, tripods and video cameras. But the collection desk is at the foot of Momo's staircase, that is at the exit, on the opposite side from St Peter's Square: anyone going on to the Basilica should leave nothing there, because they would be walking an hour back. There is no left luggage in the Basilica
• There is no Wi-Fi, in any area, for stated security reasons. No eating or drinking in the rooms, no smoking anywhere, and no dogs except guide dogs
• The Laocoön and the wrong arm. It was found on 14 January 1506 in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill, above the Domus Aurea; Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to take a look, and Michelangelo went with him. He bought it at once, and it is the foundation stone of the Vatican collections. The right arm was missing, and for four and a half centuries they gave it one stretched upwards, first in terracotta and then in marble. In 1906 Ludwig Pollak found the real arm in Rome: it was bent. It was only put back around 1960
• The Round Hall is Michelangelo Simonetti's eighteenth century copy of the Pantheon, finished in 1779, and at its centre stands a monolithic basin of red porphyry thirteen metres round. Tradition says it came from Nero's Domus Aurea; the museums' own notice is more cautious and says only that it must have adorned a large public space in imperial Rome. The floor is an assembly of third century mosaics found at Otricoli and Sacrofano
• The Gallery of Maps is the thing nobody expects. A hundred and twenty metres by six, forty maps painted from 1580 onwards to designs by the Dominican Egnazio Danti, cosmographer to Gregory XIII. The regions are not placed at random: on one side those of the Tyrrhenian and the Ligurian Sea, on the other those of the Adriatic and the Alps, with the Apennines as the watershed. Walking down the middle of the gallery, you are walking along the Apennines, with Italy open to your right and your left like a book
• The Raphael Rooms are crossed the wrong way round. The route begins in the Hall of Constantine, which was painted last and is the least his, and ends in the Room of the Segnatura, which is the first and the most his: you see the workshop first and the master afterwards. In the Segnatura, which was Julius II's private library, the "School of Athens" and the "Disputation of the Holy Sacrament" face each other from wall to wall, reason opposite revealed faith. Raphael worked here from 1508 until his death in 1520, at thirty seven
• The Sistine Chapel, what you see once you know. The room is Sixtus IV's, finished around 1481, and its proportions repeat those of the Temple of Solomon as described in the Book of Kings: it is not a coincidence, it was the whole point. When Michelangelo arrived in 1508 it was already fully painted: the Stories of Moses and the Stories of Christ on the side walls, panel against panel, were the work of Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Rosselli and Signorelli. He filled the ceiling, which had been a starry sky: 1508-1512, five hundred and fifty square metres, and he did not paint lying down, he worked standing with his head tipped back, and he said so himself in a sonnet
• The nine stories of Genesis run from the altar towards the door, in chronological order. Anyone coming in therefore meets them backwards, from the last to the first: you walk back through time towards the Creation, and the Creation of Adam is the fourth in the row. Around them, seven Prophets and five Sibyls, prophets of Israel and pagan prophetesses set on the same level
• The Last Judgement is twenty five years later, 1536-1541, and to paint it Michelangelo destroyed three frescoes by Perugino and two lunettes of his own. There are more than four hundred figures, two and a half metres tall at the top and a metre and a half at the bottom, because the perspective is corrected for someone looking up from the floor. In the flayed skin that Saint Bartholomew holds in his hand people recognise a distorted self portrait of Michelangelo, and that is a modern reading, not a signature; at the bottom right, Minos with the ass's ears is Biagio da Cesena, the master of ceremonies who had said the fresco was fit for a tavern
• The breeches. On 21 January 1564 the Council of Trent ordered the nudity to be covered; Michelangelo died on 18 February of the same year, and the job went to Daniele da Volterra, who earned his nickname the breeches maker from it. In the restoration of 1980-1994 the later breeches were removed and Daniele's sixteenth century ones were left, because by now they are part of the history of the work. That restoration is also the reason the colours of the Sistine Chapel look like no reproduction made before the nineteen eighties, and the argument about how much was taken off has never entirely closed
• The staircase is not Bramante's. The one you go down on the way out is Giuseppe Momo's spiral staircase, of 1932, and it is double: two intertwined ramps that never meet, so that people going up never cross people coming down. The real Bramante staircase is of 1505, it is in the Palazzetto del Belvedere, it is a single ramp that could be ridden up on horseback, and it is not on the normal visitor route
• Sphere Within Sphere in the Courtyard of the Pinecone is by Arnaldo Pomodoro, four metres across, put there in 1990. It turns slowly, moved by the wind. The outer sphere is smooth and perfect, the one inside is cracked and corroded: Pomodoro spoke of the cracks and of the destructive potential of our own time. He died on 23 June 2025
• The bronze pine cone that gives the courtyard its name is Roman, of the first or second century, nearly four metres tall, signed by Publius Cincius Salvius. It served as a fountain, probably at the temple of Isis in the Campus Martius: the water came out of the scales. For centuries it stood in the four sided portico of the old basilica of St Peter's, and Dante names it in the Inferno to give the measure of Nimrod's face. The two peacocks flanking it are copies: the originals, Hadrianic and probably from the Mausoleum of Hadrian, are indoors in the Braccio Nuovo
• St Peter's, in the afternoon. Entry is free and no booking is needed; you pay only if you want a guaranteed time slot, which costs 7 euros and includes the audio guide. Security checks are compulsory for everyone, in the right-hand hemicycle of the square as you face the basilica, and the worst days are Wednesday, when the audience is held, and Sunday, for the midday Angelus. The Vatican Grottoes are free to visit
• The Dome, if you still have the breath for it: 22 euros with the lift, 17 with the stairs, and either way the ticket includes the basilica. There are 551 steps in all, which come down to 320 if you take the lift, because the lift only reaches the terrace. Not advised for anyone with heart or breathing problems, vertigo or claustrophobia. Open 7:00-18:00 in summer
• Bernini's colonnade is of 1657-1667: 284 columns in four rows, sixteen metres tall, and 140 statues of saints on top, 3.10 metres tall, roughly half the height of those on top of the facade. The thing to do in the square is to look on the ground, between the obelisk and each of the two fountains, for the slab of white marble with a granite disc and the words CENTRO DEL COLONNATO, the centre of the colonnade: these are the two foci of the ellipse, and standing exactly there the four rows of columns line up and you see only one
• The obelisk is Egyptian, it comes from Heliopolis, it has no hieroglyphs, and it was brought to Rome by Caligula in AD 40 for the spine of the circus where Peter was later killed. Sixtus V had it moved to the centre of the square: thirteen months of preparation and then, on 10 September 1586, nine hundred men, seventy five horses and forty winches. It is the only obelisk in Rome that has never fallen
• On Maderno's facade there are thirteen statues nearly six metres tall: Christ the Redeemer in the middle, John the Baptist and eleven apostles. Peter is missing, and not by oversight: he is down below, in front of the steps, because the basilica is his
• How we got our ticket. Online, two weeks ahead, through one of the tour operators with an office in via Germanico, in the Prati district. It costs a little more than the official ticket, because the reseller's margin is added to the museum price, but the service takes you past the queue, and for us the supplement was worth what it cost. This is not the thing the Museums warn about: there they mean domains that pretend to be the official site, here it is an agency with a sign on the street openly selling a service. Anyone who wants to spend as little as possible buys on tickets.museivaticani.va, and then has to move a long way ahead of time

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