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.