Seven kilometres of galleries, the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel: the Vatican Museums and the treasures that surround them, from the gardens to the ancient necropolis.
Last updated August 23, 2026
In a nutshell: the Vatican Museums gather one of the world's great art collections into 7 km of galleries: the antique sculpture of the Pio-Clementino, the Raphael Rooms, the Gallery of Maps and, at the end, the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's ceiling and Last Judgment. The same chapter covers the Vatican Gardens and the ancient necropolis beneath the hill. St Peter's Basilica is next door, Borgo and Prati offer food, wine and quiet nearby, and the district overview ties it all together.
The Museums hold more masterpieces than entire countries, and their 7km of galleries rank among the finest collections of art anywhere. Exploring everything in depth would take days, but even a single visit leaves you dazzled, masterpiece after masterpiece. Check the official site (museivaticani.va) for current opening days, hours and prices.
Tip: Skip the ticket queue by booking online for a modest surcharge, or take a guided tour. Mornings are the busiest stretch; afternoons usually calm down, and wet days are the worst of all - everyone gets the same notion of dodging the rain.
The backstory: Pope Julius II founded the Museums early in the 16th century to house the Vatican's vast collections in a single spot, but admittance was confined to the popes and their circle. Pope Clement XIV finally opened the doors to everyone during the second half of the 18th century. The institution stretches across 5.5 hectares, embracing two great buildings, the Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano and the Palazzetto di Belvedere, linked by two lengthy galleries and enclosing three courtyards: the Cortile della Pigna, the Cortile della Biblioteca and the Cortile del Belvedere. Guests glimpse only a sliver of the holdings; exhibiting everything would be impossible. Trivia: the present director, Barbara Jatta, is the first woman to occupy the post.
The crowds hurry to the Raphael Rooms and the vivid sculpture of the Pio-Clementino Museum, yet the papal picture gallery fully merits attention. It gathers works from the 11th through the 19th centuries by Raphael, Giotto, Titian, Caravaggio and Leonardo. Three Raphaels stand out: the Madonna di Foligno (1511-12), the Incoronazione della Vergine (Crowning of the Virgin; 1502-04) and, finest of all, the Transfiguration (1516-20), a blaze of colour. Leonardo's San Girolamo (St Jerome; 1480-90) haunts the visitor despite remaining unfinished, while Caravaggio's Deposizione (The Entombment of Christ; 1603-04) is as achingly human as everything he painted.
Most of the Vatican's antique sculpture is gathered in the Museo Pio-Clementino, whose treasures occupy the Cortile Ottagono: the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere. The Laocoön Group portrays the Trojan priest Laocoön with his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, attacked by serpents dispatched to stop him from counselling the Trojans against the wooden horse. Carved between 27 BCE and 68 CE, the piece ranks among the finest renderings of human agony. The Apollo Belvedere, made in the 2nd century CE and likely a marble replica of a 4th-century-BCE bronze original, stands as a model of grace and harmonious proportion. Elsewhere the museum impresses: the Apoxyomenos, stationed just before the Cortile Ottagono, is a Roman reproduction of a Greek work from the 4th century BCE and counts among the first statues to show a figure with an arm raised; the Sala delle Muse displays the celebrated Torso Belvedere, a remnant of a sinewy Greek statue of the 1st century BCE that served as a model for Michelangelo; and the Sala Rotonda holds giant statues, a bronze Hercules of the late 1st century CE among them, plus an immense basin hewn from a single block of red porphyry that once stood in Nero's Domus Aurea.
Statues and busts by the thousand pack these walls - chubby cherubs, grave Roman patricians, handsome deities and river gods buried under infants. One river only, in fact: the Nile, whose 16 babies stand for the 16 cubits the water rose in flood season.
Forty giant topographical maps fill this 120m corridor, painted between 1580 and 1583 at Gregory XIII's behest. They picture every Italian region plus Corsica (then Genoese), Malta (home of the Knights of Malta), the stretch around Avignon in France - formerly papal ground - and two views of Italy, one ancient and one 'modern' as the 16th century knew it. Italians adore the room and can always be found picking out their native villages on the painstakingly detailed panels. Some maps appear upside down, and rightly so: north-at-top was not yet the cartographic rule, so regions lying south of Rome are shown as Rome itself would 'see' them.
The Museo Gregoriano's two wings, founded under Gregory XVI during the 1800s, preserve Egyptian and Etruscan antiquities: statues, sarcophagi and a mummy among the Egyptian exhibits, plus artefacts and vases in the Etruscan ones.
Four chambers make up the Stanze di Raffaello, frescoed between 1508 and 1524, originally forming part of Pope Julius II's private rooms. The Stanza della Segnatura and the Stanza d'Eliodoro are wholly Raphael's own work; the Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo and the Sala di Costantino were executed by his workshop from his cartoons, following the custom of the day. The Sala di Costantino, used for formal receptions, shows the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, in which Constantine - the first ruler to embrace Christianity - overcame his opponent Maxentius. Opening off it, the Cappella Niccolina served as the pope's personal chapel, adorned by Fra' Angelico, though visitors are usually turned away from it. In the Stanza d'Eliodoro, where private audiences took place, four scenes line the walls: the Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple (which lends the room its title), the Mass of Bolsena, the Encounter of Leo the Great with Attila and the Liberation of St Peter. The celebrated third chamber, the Stanza della Segnatura, contains the School of Athens, where philosophers surround Plato and Aristotle, twin pillars of Western thought, set opposite the Disputation on the Sacrament. The Stanza dell'Incendio del Borgo, last of the four, first lodged the Holy See's supreme tribunal and then served as a dining hall; its chief fresco, Fire in the Borgo, shows Pope Leo IV quelling a blaze with a blessing.
The Museums' supreme treasure and the setting for several of the Holy See's weightiest ceremonies. Two of the globe's most celebrated artworks live here: Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes and his Last Judgment. Crane your neck and take in some of the finest works Rome can show.
Tip: Unlike the rest of the Museums, the chapel is an active place of worship, like St Peter's: dress respectfully and keep the volume down. Photography of any kind is banned - guards force visitors to erase any pictures they catch being taken. Certain tours slip through before the Museums open their doors, which is worth knowing if you prefer a less crowded view.
History: the chapel is named for Sixtus IV, who had it raised between 1475 and 1481 and dedicated it in August 1483, its proportions echoing the Temple of Solomon. Its appearance was once quite different: the vault showed a ceiling of painted stars, and the walls carried frescoes by the finest painters of the era. Of that original scheme only the wall paintings plus the marble pavement remain; Michelangelo's two masterpieces swept away the rest, each commissioned by a different pope at a different time. He painted the ceiling for Julius II between 1508 and 1512, part of Julius's ambition to crown Rome the radiant capital of Catholicism. The Last Judgment arrived in 1541 under Paul III, urging Catholics to stand firm as the Reformation gathered force across Europe.
Michelangelo hesitated over the task, having trained chiefly as a sculptor and doubting his skill with fresco. A fee worth about €1.5 to €2 million today finally persuaded him. His ceiling unfolds tales from Genesis across nine panels surrounded by 20 nude male figures called ignudi - a source of scandal when the chapel opened to the 16th-century public. Nearest the Last Judgment, three panels depict God fashioning the cosmos: the Separation of Light from Darkness, a terrible God reaching for the sun, the Creation of the Sun, Moon and Plants, and the Separation of Land from Sea. Three more panels turn to humanity: the celebrated Creation of Adam, a bearded God whose finger nearly meets Adam's, the Creation of Eve, and the Fall with the Banishment from Eden. The final three recount Noah's story - his Sacrifice, the Flood and his Drunkenness. Five sibyls, Delphi and Cumae among them, and seven prophets flank the Genesis scenes, emblems of humanity's patient hope for salvation.
Commissioned in the time of Clement VII and driven on by his successor Paul III, the Last Judgment was executed between 1536 and 1541, filling the chapel's 200 sq metre western wall with the image of Christ's return. At the centre Christ stands within a golden glow, saints around him including his mother Mary. Above, angels bear the instruments of the Passion - the cross and the whipping post. Beneath, angels with trumpets herald the end of days and the rising of the dead: souls revive at the lower left, the blessed climb to Heaven while the wicked tumble into Hell at the lower right. In Hell's ranks appear Caron, the infernal boatman, waving his oar, and Minos, judge of the underworld, sporting ass's ears and a serpent coiled about his body. The fresco stirred controversy from the outset, largely over its nude figures; in 1564 the order came to clothe them. Michelangelo's pupil Daniele da Volterra took on the task, painting leaves and loincloths onto over 40 figures and gaining the nickname il braghettone, which means the breeches maker.
It seems strange to dismiss the chapel's remaining decoration as mere 'wall frescoes', since anywhere else these panels would be the headline act. Painted in the later 1400s for the original chapel, with Botticelli, Pinturicchio and Perugino among the crew, they narrate the lives of Moses and of Christ, flanking the Last Judgment. The best known is Perugino's Handing of the Keys (1481-82), in which Christ bestows the keys of heaven upon a kneeling St Peter.
Nearly half of Vatican City's territory is green. The gardens (museivaticani.va) are split into zones tended in different styles - an Italian-style garden, an English-style one and the Orto del Papa, as it is called. The first plantings date from the late 13th century, when Pope Nicholas III ordered an orchard, a lawn and a proper garden where popes could meditate in quiet. The grounds took their present form between the 16th and 17th centuries, following designs by architects such as Donato Bramante and Pirro Ligorio. Today they are dotted with fountains, statues and grottoes, and also contain the state's miniature heliport, a railway station plus the radio headquarters of the Vatican. Guided walks last about two hours, with a separate itinerary for wheelchair users and visitors with limited mobility.
Do not mistake this for the grottoes beneath St Peter's: it is an ancient Roman burial ground from the 1st to 4th centuries CE, an era when the law obliged graves to be dug outside town. Freed slaves owned most of the tombs, people who had saved enough for a dignified grave of their own. All of it vanished underground when Constantine levelled the Vatican Hill to begin the first St Peter's - unusual, since the cemetery might still have been in use, but justified by the site's probable role as the place of St Peter's martyrdom.
Tip: Access is tightly controlled to protect the narrow, delicate spaces. Reserve well ahead via the booking form on the Vatican site (scan.va/content/scavi/en/form-prenotazioni-visite.html), stating the language you would like the tour in, then wait to see if a slot opens up.
Tickets: admission runs €25, dropping to €13 for visitors aged 7 to 18, while children six and under enter free. The booking surcharge of €5 for reserving online is folded into those figures. On the final Sunday of every month entry is free for everyone, which makes that day enormously crowded. The official site, museivaticani.va, or the phone line +39 06 6988 4676, is where to confirm the latest calendar, hours and prices.
Reserve ahead, without fail. Queues to buy tickets on the day can stretch to two hours, so book your timed entry online, ideally several weeks to several months out. Choose the ticket labelled 'Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel'. A QR code arrives by email; once inside, exchange it for a printed ticket at a Welcome Desk window in the lobby or process it yourself on a machine upstairs. If no reservation slots remain, the 'Guided Tours for Individuals' option costs a little more but guarantees entry, and you are free to leave the group once inside. Guided tours run €40 including admission.
At the door three queues form: individuals without reservations queue far left (sometimes stretching for whole blocks beside the Vatican wall), reserved ticket holders in the centre, and organised groups at the far right. A guard scans the code and waves you through the middle queue. Audio guides go for €8 and are picked up where the spiral ramp levels out at the top; you can pay for one in advance with your online booking. The checkroom only accepts larger bags, and the post office upstairs sells stamps that collectors covet.
Shape of the visit: the complex runs like a barbell, with two terminal buildings joined by a long connecting hall. The entrance wing gathers the Egyptian, Greek and Roman collections; the far pavilion presents the Renaissance revival, Sistine Chapel included. Allow about two and a half hours for the whole walk and keep a steady pace, saving your energy for the chapel at the end. If time is short, make a beeline from the octagonal courtyard to the Sistine, enjoying whatever you pass on the way. For the wider neighbourhood, see the district overview.
The tour starts outdoors in this airy courtyard, designed by Bramante as part of the popes' summer residence on a breezy hilltop. The bronze pinecone at the centre, twelve feet tall, has stood for two millennia: it began near the Pantheon honouring Isis, the fertility goddess of ancient Egypt, spent its Christian centuries beside the door of the first St Peter's church, and finally came to rest here. The huge shiny sphere beside it arrived in 1990, the work of sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, variously read as the cosmos or as our planet cradled in the heavens. Ancient, Christian, Renaissance and modern art all meet in this one square.
Climb the marble staircase and the Egyptian collection proves devotional rather than decorative: statues and paintings preserved a person's likeness so the soul would have a home in the afterlife. The star exhibit is the mummy of a woman who passed away some three thousand years back - her organs stored in canopic jars, her body dried with natron, wrapped in linen, then nestled in a wooden coffin inside a stone one; the henna rinse in her hair is a vanity that spanned the grave. Alongside are shabti figurines buried with the dead, the stiff, schematic statues that once stood in the imperial retreat at Hadrian's Villa, and a veritable menagerie of animal deities: Anubis, the jackal draped in a Roman toga; Sekhmet, the lioness goddess; Thoth, the baboon of wisdom; and Bes, squat patron of expectant mothers. In a side case, Sumerian clay tablets from Mesopotamia carry the world's earliest writing, pressed with wedge-shaped cuneiform pens around 3000 BCE.
The Octagonal Courtyard is where the Museums were effectively born: in 1506 Pope Julius II began displaying his collection here to entertain important guests, and public access followed around the year 1800. The star is the Laocoön Group, dug up in 1506 from beneath Nero's Golden House, close by the Colosseum, after more than a millennium underground. The find made a huge stir: the group was scrubbed clean, carried through the streets before a stunned public, and so entered the collection as its founding exhibit. Young Michelangelo saw it and was transformed; two years on, he began the Sistine vault. The sculpture was hewn from four separate marble slabs fitted together so perfectly that the seams vanish, and the right arm, which scholars once believed pointed straight ahead, only met its elbow when the missing fragment was finally recovered in the early twentieth century. Goethe liked to stand before it blinking hard, insisting the marble seemed to come alive.
The Apollo Belvedere, his neighbour, is the opposite ideal: serene and graceful, poised exactly between repose and movement. This is a Roman-era replica of a Hellenistic bronze in the spirit of Praxiteles, and during the Renaissance it was regarded as the finest artwork the world had ever seen. His left hand is a modern addition. The face stayed with Michelangelo: the Christ of the Last Judgment clearly borrows from this Apollo. An aged river god sprawled in a shady niche nearby had the same effect on him - the reclining Adam on the ceiling, stretching toward the Creator, borrows that very pose. A side hall, the so-called Hall of Animals, parades an ancient menagerie of real and invented beasts, every piece a classical statue reworked during the 1700s.
The Belvedere Torso is a battered remnant of classical sculpture - a powerful figure perched on an animal hide, possibly Hercules in his lion pelt, signed by one Apollonius, a sculptor of the 1st century BCE. Its knotty, bulging muscles impressed Michelangelo deeply; he styled himself a disciple of the Torso; in his final fresco, Christ's twisting body mimics the Torso's turned pose.
The domed Round Room is modelled on the interior of the Pantheon. Its bronze Hercules, club in hand, was found near the Theatre of Pompey, and the mosaic floor underfoot, seventeen centuries old, was salvaged from the bottom of an ancient bathhouse pool. The colossal basin at the centre once decorated Nero's palace: it is carved from one enormous piece of imperial porphyry, the purple stone from a single Egyptian mountain that was reserved for emperors and later for popes. The quarry is now exhausted, so nothing new can be cut, and any imperial porphyry seen today has been reused.
The Greek Cross Room takes its name from its floor plan and holds two porphyry sarcophagi made, but never used, for Constantine's mother Helena and his daughter Constanza. Helena's coffin shows Roman horsemen trampling their barbarian victims; Constanza's mixes Christian lambs and peacocks with pagan scenes of grape harvests. Both women were Christians before Constantine legalised the faith in 313 CE, and both were later venerated as saints. The coffins were hewn in Egypt, and the art of shaping such mercilessly hard stone was lost with them; porphyry was not carved again until Florence in the Renaissance.
The long galleries that follow were the corridors of a chain of papal palaces, and their marble floors, gilded stucco ceilings and endless statues speak of a Church at the summit of its power - extravagance of exactly the kind that moved Martin Luther to rebellion. In the candelabra gallery you pass Diana the Huntress, whom Roman hunters honoured with prayers and offerings before the chase, while across the hall another Artemis, festooned with a multitude of breasts, embodied fertility. Farther along, Bacchus carries a toddler on his back. Quite a few of these marbles were once painted in gaudy colours and given glass eyes, and between 1550 and 1800 the Church ordered plaster fig leaves over their private parts.
The tapestries running along the next wall were conceived in Raphael's workshop and loomed in Brussels about 1524, narrating episodes from the Gospel. The full-scale, full-colour cartoons were shipped to the Flemish looms, cut into strips, and reproduced thread by thread. The Resurrection panel sits roughly two-thirds along the hall: as you move past it, the risen Christ's eyes and feet, his knee, even the tomb's stone slab, all appear to follow you as you pass. Above, the ceilings look like sculpted relief, but look again - they are trompe-l'oeil paintings on a flat ceiling, shadows and all.
The Map Gallery is the splendour of the papal palace at its most theatrical. Forty maps of Italian regions run from the toe of the boot at the entrance side of the gallery to the Alps at the far wall, the east of the peninsula lining the right-hand wall and the west along the other side; they remained the state's authoritative cartography from their painting in 1582 right through the 1800s. The moulded stucco ceiling is painted in the grotesque style, named after the ancient Roman grottoes where such ornament was rediscovered. Hunt out the sea-blue panel of Liguria, where five little villages hug the Cinque Terre shoreline exactly as in 1582, and the chariot in which Neptune carries Columbus toward the New World. At the end, a map of Italy as the 1500s knew it faces the peninsula as antiquity saw it; whichever you study, the dominant city is Rome. The windows offer the best view anywhere of the tiny state of Vatican City, with its radio tower; peering left you catch the great cupola of St Peter's as Michelangelo meant it to be seen, before the heavy Baroque front was added. Venice floats on a fish-shaped island.
Where the gallery ends, the crowds split: a shortcut marked as the short itinerary, which runs a direct line toward the Sistine Chapel; this is the route most hurried tour groups take. The fuller tour turns left instead, into the papal apartments.
The Constantine Room celebrates the handover of power from pagan Rome to Christian Rome, executed from 1517 to 1524, with the final scenes completed after Raphael's demise by his pupils, above all Giulio Romano. One night in late October 312 CE, the general saw a cross of light overhead, a promise of victory; the next day his legions charged the enemy bearing the cross above their eagle banners. The cycle continues with his baptism at the hands of a pope and the famous document by which he supposedly donated Rome to the papacy - later exposed as a forgery. On the ceiling, a classical statue topples backward before the conquering cross.
In the Heliodorus Room (1512-14), the Liberation fresco tells how an angel woke the apostle in his Jerusalem prison, struck off his chains and led him past the sleeping guards. Raphael dramatises the night with four sources of light at once: the half moon, the jailer's torch, the glowing angel and the daylight flooding in from the museum's own window. Julius II, who ordered these frescoes, badgered Michelangelo into accepting the Sistine commission and broke ground on the new St Peter's, appears again and again: as the apostle in the Liberation fresco, seated at the left of the Heliodorus expulsion scene, and kneeling as the pontiff in the Bolsena Mass fresco on the facing wall.
The Segnatura Room (1508-11) served as the pontiff's personal study, and here Raphael set down his School of Athens, the Renaissance's own manifesto. Plato and Aristotle anchor the centre: Plato points upward to the realm of pure ideas and mathematics, Aristotle gestures down to the world of matter and observation. Socrates tallies his points on his fingers; up front, the balding geometer Euclid stoops over his slate, sketching a proof. Raphael, who was 25 when Julius summoned him in 1508, cast his contemporaries as the ancients: Leonardo da Vinci as Plato, the architect Bramante as Euclid. He painted himself in at the far right, in a black beret, looking out at us. The composition is a study in symmetry - the floor tiles and the column capitals all lead the eye to the arch that crowns the two philosophers like a halo. While Raphael worked here, Michelangelo was painting the chapel ceiling down the hall; a glimpse of Michelangelo's powerful figures stunned him, and he went back to the fresco and worked in a portrait of the master himself - the brooding presence propped against a stone block.
Opposite, the Disputation on the Sacrament answers the philosophers with a heavenly counterpart: the risen Christ and the company of saints look down from heaven while mortals argue over the Eucharist below, the consecrated host that the Church teaches turns into Christ's own body. A cascade of nested circles binds the two worlds: the haloed Christ above, the Spirit descending as a dove, and the host resting on the altar below. Dante wears the laurel wreath of a poet at the lower right; the profile on the Italian two-euro coin is drawn from this very figure.
The last of the rooms, the Incendio del Borgo room (1514-17), was executed largely by Raphael's pupils, who had begun imitating the muscular bodies of Michelangelo. Stop for a moment - the WCs are nearby, and the chapel lies some ten minutes' walk from here. The route threads through the modern sacred art galleries, where canvases by Matisse, Chagall, Dalí and Bacon precede the chapel itself.
The Sistine Chapel is the pope's personal place of worship and the setting for the election of every new pope; the small stove that burns the conclave ballots, sending up its telltale smoke, stands at the rear. It is a working church, not a gallery, and that is why the atmosphere is so strictly policed.
Michelangelo initially refused the commission, protesting that sculpture, not painting, was his craft; Julius cajoled, bribed and issued threats until the artist gave in, on one condition: he would do everything his own way. The pope had asked for a dozen apostles along the vault; Michelangelo delivered instead the whole of human history up to the birth of Christ. For four years, from 1508 to 1512, he lay craning upward from a scaffold raised six storeys, painting the vault almost entirely by hand - unlike Raphael, who designed and let assistants do the painting. The vault arranges itself into three clear bands: a middle row of nine panels telling the story of Genesis, the prophets and sibyls lining the curving sides, and the corner triangles occupied by the forebears of Jesus.
The nine central panels follow one another in order, beginning at the entrance end. The deity features in the opening five panels, robed in purple: he divides light from darkness, creates the burning orange sun and the pale moon, and bursts apart the land and the sea. Then comes the celebrated Creation of Adam, in which God swoops in with his swirling entourage, the swirl reading, to a fanciful eye, like a slice of human brain tissue, a bold humanist gesture. Adam's hand hangs limp, utterly passive; God's is forceful, the finger twitching with energy, and life itself leaps across the gap between the two hands. God creates Eve from Adam's side, and the tempter, a serpent with the torso of a woman, coils about the forbidden tree, tempting the pair before an angel brandishing a sword expels them from Paradise - Adam sturdy and indignant, gesturing that they are going. The final three scenes follow Noah: his sacrifice, the great flood, and his sons discovering him drunk. A bare smudge in the flood scene has a story: in 1793 an ammunition store close by exploded, rattling the chapel.
The prophets and sibyls along the sides are monumental, robed figures on thrones, each with a distinct personality. Isaiah, whose throne bears the name Esaias, keeps his place near the carved screen on the chapel's right in composed majesty; in the corner nearest the Last Judgment, Jeremiah - the prophet who lived through the ruin of his nation - props his chin on a fist, gloom personified. The Delphic Sibyl writhes toward the viewer, a scroll in her hands proclaiming Christ's arrival. Pagan prophetesses and Hebrew prophets here share one grand plan. Notice that those figures painted at the room's distant end come out noticeably smaller: he had opened the project at that end, with the story of Noah, and when the scaffolding came down in 1510 he alone was dissatisfied, feeling the figures lacked drama seen from the floor. For the second half of the vault he went all out, and the contrast between the two halves charts the evolution of his style.
Two decades after the ceiling, in 1535, Michelangelo was called back to paint humanity's last day on the altar wall. Europe had changed: the Reformation had set the Church on edge, religious wars raged, and Rome itself had been sacked by mercenaries. The optimism of the ceiling's Creation had curdled. Here Christ, twisting with the power of the Belvedere Torso, lifts his arm to strike down the damned, and no one - not even the saints gathered around him, not even Mary shrinking beneath his raised arm - smiles. Angels in a band blow their trumpets to rouse the dead; the righteous are hauled up to heaven while the damned are hurled down, where Charon ferries them to hell and demons gleefully torment them. Over three hundred bodies twist through the composition, leaving traditional Renaissance balance far behind. Its 1541 unveiling caused an uproar; the pope reportedly fell to his knees on the spot, praying to be spared the accounting of his own sins. The fleshy nudes stirred grumbles among church authorities, and Michelangelo answered by painting his sternest critic into the fresco, reborn as the serpent-wrapped demon at the lower right. After his death, the prudish censors added the wisps of drapery still visible today.
Conservators in the late 20th century scrubbed both the vault and the altar wall, stripping away layers of grime laid down by centuries of candle smoke and lamp soot, along with old protective coatings. The brilliant colours that emerged forced a wholesale rethink of Michelangelo as a colourist. Untouched streaks still visible high in the corner beside the altar wall give a sense of how gloomy the chapel once was.
To leave, take the exit door flanking the screen, keeping the altar behind you, on the left-hand side. You rejoin the museum on the level below the Long March you walked earlier, and the corridor back to the entrance takes about a quarter of an hour. Along the way, the corridor showcases the treasures the papacy accumulated over the centuries, a great many of them royal presents, and the 1529 world map; look for the land labelled Terra Incognita and try to find your hometown. The richly decorated library opening to one side holds rare manuscripts. Follow the exit signs past the souvenir stands and snack bars, emerge onto the grassy lawn, and loop back inside to the Pinacoteca before leaving.
Heading out, two small delights await. The final room of the Pinacoteca holds Wenzel Peter's lush zoo of a paradise - a circa-1800 Eden where Eve tempts a hesitant Adam, surrounded by joyful, curious animals. Past the cafeteria, across the leafy Square Courtyard, the carriage museum (Padiglione delle Carrozze) parades centuries of papal transport - coaches, motorcars and Popemobiles of every era, among them the vehicle in which an assassin's bullet struck John Paul II in 1981. The Ethnological Museum nearby displays ritual garments, ornaments, implements and prehistoric relics from cultures across the globe. Take one final look at the great dome rising above the Vatican before you head back into the city.