Vatican Museums

About Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums: five centuries of art at the heart of Rome

Within the walls of the world's smallest country lies one of its greatest treasure houses. The Vatican Museums hold the immense art collection amassed by the popes over five hundred years — a labyrinth of galleries that culminates in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and ranks among the largest and most visited museum complexes on earth.

To walk them is to travel through the history of Western art itself, from Egyptian mummies and Roman marbles to Renaissance masterpieces and modern religious works, all gathered in the service of the Catholic Church in Vatican City.

Founded by a Renaissance pope

The museums trace their origin to 1506, when Pope Julius II placed a newly unearthed ancient statue — the Laocoön group — on public display in the Vatican. That single act of patronage grew, over the centuries, into a vast network of collections as successive popes added antiquities, paintings and treasures. Today the complex comprises dozens of museums and galleries linked by several kilometres of corridors.

The Sistine Chapel

The undisputed climax of any visit is the Sistine Chapel, the pope's own chapel and the place where cardinals gather to elect a new pontiff. Its ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, and his later fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall (1536–1541), are among the supreme achievements of Renaissance art. Visitors stand in hushed crowds beneath the famous scenes of the Creation, including the outstretched hands of God and Adam. Photography is not permitted inside the chapel, and silence is requested.

Raphael, maps and marble

Long before the Sistine Chapel, the route passes through other wonders. The Raphael Rooms (Stanze di Raffaello) preserve the frescoes Raphael painted for Julius II, among them The School of Athens, a serene gathering of the great philosophers of antiquity. The dazzling Gallery of Maps lines a long corridor with 16th-century painted maps of Italy beneath a gilded ceiling. In the Pio-Clementino museum stand celebrated classical sculptures such as the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere, while the Pinacoteca (picture gallery), the Egyptian and Etruscan museums and the collection of modern religious art fill out an almost overwhelming whole.

The spiral staircase and the scale of it all

Near the exit, most visitors descend the museums' iconic double-helix spiral staircase, designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932, whose two intertwined ramps let people going up and down never meet — one of the most photographed staircases in the world. The scale of the museums is famous and daunting: several kilometres of galleries holding tens of thousands of works, drawing on the order of six to seven million visitors a year, which makes crowd-planning as important as art history for anyone visiting.

Visiting the Vatican Museums

The museums are open to the public most days, with an admission fee, and are generally closed on Sundays — with the notable exception of the last Sunday of each month, when entry is free and queues are enormous. Because lines can stretch for hours, timed tickets booked online in advance are strongly recommended, and early morning or late-afternoon slots are the least crowded. As this is a religious site, a modest dress code is enforced: shoulders and knees must be covered. The standard route flows one way and ends at the Sistine Chapel, so it is worth pacing yourself for the highlights near the end.