Vatican Museums

Interesting facts

In 2024 the Vatican Museums drew about 6.8 million visitors, ranking second among the world's art museums after the Louvre.

According to his early biographers Vasari and Condivi, Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling standing with his head bent back, not lying flat as popular imagination has it.

Michelangelo, a sculptor first and foremost, resisted the Sistine commission and even suggested that his young rival Raphael should paint the ceiling instead.

The Sistine ceiling is a shallow barrel vault about 35 metres long, and Michelangelo's final scheme for it contains more than 300 figures.

The Gallery of Maps runs for about 120 metres, and its 40 painted map panels of the Italian regions were completed in just three years, 1580 to 1583.

The original Bramante Staircase of 1505 was a ramp built so that Pope Julius II could reach his residence without leaving his carriage.

The 1932 ramp is a double helix, so people climbing never meet those descending; some scholars see it as a model for Wright's Guggenheim Museum.

The Museo Pio-Clementino takes its name from two popes: Clement XIV, who founded it in 1771, and his successor Pius VI, who completed it.

The Galleria Lapidaria holds more than 3,000 ancient stone tablets and inscriptions and is normally opened only to scholars with special permission.

The Collection of Modern Religious Art, added in 1973, includes works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Chagall, Klee, Dalí and Picasso.

Why it is worth it

The Vatican Museums grew from a single statue. In January 1506 the Laocoön group was dug up in a vineyard in Rome; Pope Julius II sent Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo to look at it, bought it, and put it on show in the Vatican a month later. Five centuries of papal collecting followed, and the museums now hold around 70,000 works, some 20,000 of them on display in galleries, courtyards and apartments of the papal palaces.

The classic route is long and ends where most visitors want it to. It starts with ancient sculpture in the Pio-Clementino: the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere and the Belvedere Torso that Michelangelo studied. It continues through the Gallery of Maps, where the friar Ignazio Danti painted maps of all of Italy for Pope Gregory XIII, and into the Raphael Rooms, with The School of Athens of 1509–1511. It finishes in the Sistine Chapel, with Michelangelo's ceiling, including The Creation of Adam, and his Last Judgment on the altar wall.

Plenty lies off that line: the Pinacoteca with Raphael's Transfiguration, Leonardo's Saint Jerome in the Wilderness and Caravaggio's Entombment; the Egyptian and Etruscan museums; the Borgia Apartment; the collection of modern religious art; and the double-helix spiral ramp of 1932 by Giuseppe Momo, often called the Bramante Staircase. The queue for the monthly free Sunday opening is famous for its length.

Getting there

The entrance is on Viale Vaticano, on the north side of the Vatican walls in Rome, about 7 minutes' walk from Ottaviano station on metro line A (Cipro is also close); bus 49 stops in the square in front. The nearest airport is Ciampino (CIA), about 17 km away.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

The Vatican Museums are the public museums of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the best-known Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, and currently employ 640 people who work in 40 different administrative, scholarly, and restoration departments.

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Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia