Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel

The route is one-way. These ten stops follow it in order, from the entrance to the way out.

1. The wall and the door: a museum inside a state

The high wall beside the pavement is a border. Behind it is Vatican City, the smallest state in the world, less than half a square kilometre. When you go through the door you leave Italy.

The collection began in 1506, when Pope Julius II put a newly found ancient statue in his garden courtyard and let artists come to look. Later popes went on buying, digging and building. The first rooms made to be a public museum opened in 1771.

Popes were princes as well as priests. Owning the best of ancient Rome was a way of saying that Rome's greatness had passed to them.

2. The Pinecone Courtyard

The bronze pinecone in the niche is nearly four metres high and almost two thousand years old. It was a fountain in ancient Rome, and water ran out of the tips of its scales. In the Middle Ages it stood in front of the old St Peter's.

Dante saw it there. In the Inferno he describes a giant whose face is as long and as big as the pinecone of St Peter's in Rome.

3. The Octagonal Court: Laocoön and Apollo

On 14 January 1506 a man digging in his vineyard in Rome broke into a buried room and found this group. A Trojan priest and his two sons are being killed by sea snakes sent by the gods. The pope sent Michelangelo to look. Within weeks the pope had bought it.

Look at the father's body twisting, and at his face. Sculptors for the next three hundred years learned from it how to show pain.

Across the court stands the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman copy in marble of a lost Greek bronze. In the eighteenth century it was thought the most beautiful statue in the world. Napoleon took both statues to Paris in 1797. They came back in 1816.

4. The Torso and the Round Hall

This broken body, without head, arms or lower legs, is signed by Apollonios of Athens. Michelangelo studied it for hours and would not hear of restoring it. The twisting bodies on the Sistine ceiling come from here.

The Round Hall was built about 1780 as a small copy of the Pantheon. The red stone basin in the middle is cut from one block of porphyry and measures 13 metres round. It is said to come from the palace of the emperor Nero. The floor is a Roman mosaic.

5. The long galleries: candelabra, tapestries, maps

Three galleries in a row carry you towards the chapel. The last is the Gallery of Maps, 120 metres long. On its walls are forty maps of the regions of Italy, painted between 1580 and 1583.

Walk it as if you were walking down Italy from the Alps to the toe, with the Adriatic coast on one wall and the Tyrrhenian on the other. Towns, ports and even battles are marked.

The pope who ordered it was Gregory XIII, who also gave the world the calendar we use. He fixed it in 1582. In that same year a Jesuit named Matteo Ricci, who had studied in Rome under the calendar's chief mathematician, landed at Macau. Twenty years later he drew a map of the world for the emperor of China.

6. The Raphael Rooms

Julius II would not live in the rooms of the pope before him, whom he hated. He moved upstairs and in 1508 gave the walls to a painter of twenty-five, Raphael.

In the School of Athens the thinkers of ancient Greece meet under one great vault. In the middle Plato points up and Aristotle holds his hand out flat. Plato has the face of Leonardo da Vinci. The man brooding alone on the steps, leaning on a block, is thought to be Michelangelo, who was at work on the ceiling a few doors away. Raphael looks out at you from the far right edge.

In the next room look above the window for the Liberation of Saint Peter. An angel wakes Peter in his cell at night. It is one of the first great night scenes in painting, with light from the angel, the moon and a torch.

7. The Sistine Chapel: the walls and the ceiling

The chapel is named after Pope Sixtus IV, who built it between 1473 and 1481. It is 40 metres long, 13 wide and 20 high. In 1481 the best painters of Florence, among them Botticelli, painted the side walls with the lives of Moses and of Christ. Most visitors never look at them.

The ceiling then was blue with gold stars. Michelangelo covered it between 1508 and 1512 with more than three hundred figures. He worked from the door towards the altar, and the figures get bigger and bolder as he goes. Start at the altar end, with God dividing light from darkness, and read back towards the door, to Noah lying drunk.

He hated the work. He sent a friend a poem about what it was doing to his body.

I' ho già fatto un gozzo in questo stento

I have already grown a goitre from this drudgery

Michelangelo, sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia (about 1509–1510)

8. The Last Judgment

Between the ceiling and this wall, Rome was sacked by an imperial army in 1527 and half of Europe left the Roman Church. The mood is different. There is no frame and no architecture, only bodies rising and falling in a blue void.

Find Saint Bartholomew, just below Christ to the right, holding a knife and his own skin. The sagging face on the skin is Michelangelo's.

Nearly all the figures were naked. Churchmen were scandalised, and in 1565, just after Michelangelo died, a painter was paid to add drapery. He was known ever after as "the breeches-maker".

9. The chapel at work: smoke, cleaning, and cameras

For a conclave a stove is brought in and a chimney is run up through the roof. The cardinals vote on paper, and the ballots are burned. Black smoke means no decision. White smoke means there is a pope. On 8 May 2025 the white smoke was for Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States.

From 1980 to 1994 restorers cleaned four centuries of candle soot and glue off the paintings. The colours came out sharp: pink, apple green, orange. Some scholars said the cleaners had taken off Michelangelo's own finishing touches. Most now accept the bright colours as his.

The cleaning was paid for by a Japanese television company, which in return had the sole right to photograph the work. That agreement has long run out. The ban on cameras stayed.

Because filming is not allowed either, the film Conclave (2024) built the whole chapel again in a studio in Rome for its voting scenes.

10. The picture gallery, the stair, and China

The Pinacoteca, the picture gallery, is in a separate building near the entrance, and most people are too tired to go. Go for one painting: Raphael's Transfiguration. He was working on it when he died in 1520, aged 37, and it was set up at the head of his coffin.

You leave by a spiral ramp built in 1932. It is two ramps wound together, one for going up and one for going down, so that people moving in opposite directions never meet.

When Michelangelo began the ceiling in 1508, the Zhengde Emperor of the Ming (1368–1644) was on the throne, and the philosopher Wang Yangming had just been banished to Guizhou, where he worked out his teaching that knowing and doing are one.

In 1904 the reformer Kang Youwei came to Rome in exile. He wrote in his travel diary of his admiration for Raphael, and argued that Chinese painting should learn from such work.