Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel

Museum · Vatican CityRome,Italy

Seven kilometres of papal galleries in Rome — Egyptian mummies, Raphael's rooms, a corridor of painted maps — all funnelling toward Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling.

The Vatican Museums run roughly seven kilometres of galleries, and every path bends toward one small room. You shuffle for over an hour past gilded ceilings and crowded marble halls: Egyptian mummies, Etruscan gold, Raphael's frescoed apartments, a corridor lined with forty painted maps of Italy. Then the doors open onto the Sistine Chapel. Guards hush the room and cameras go down. Above you spreads Michelangelo's ceiling: nine scenes from Genesis, with the near-touching fingers of God and Adam at its heart. Michelangelo painted that ceiling on scaffolding over four years, and on the altar wall his later Last Judgment swirls with hundreds of figures. Look for the colour: a cleaning late last century lifted away centuries of candle soot, and the pinks and greens that came back are brighter than most visitors expect to see. The seven kilometres you walked to get here started with a single statue, dug out of a Roman vineyard and bought by a pope within weeks. Five centuries of popes went on filling the rooms behind it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look up before you hunt for the famous finger — the Creation of Adam is smaller and higher than anyone expects; the power is the whole vault, corners included, not one panel.
The galleries before the chapel are the actual museum — most people speed-walk to Michelangelo, but the Gallery of Maps and the Raphael Rooms are half-empty and just as extraordinary.
Michelangelo's face turns up twice — it sags on the flayed skin St Bartholomew holds in the Last Judgment, and he is probably the brooding figure on the steps of Raphael's School of Athens.
There are benches along the chapel's side walls — sit, lean your head all the way back, and let the crowd blur out. Standing packed in the middle, you miss half the ceiling.
Shoulders and knees must be covered to get in — the rule is enforced at the entrance and applies everywhere, not just the chapel; hats and sleeveless tops stop you at the door.

Things to do

1
Read the ceiling in painting order
Start at the entrance end, not the altar, with the Drunkenness of Noah, and read the nine Genesis panels toward the altar. That is the order Michelangelo actually painted them. Watch his figures grow larger and bolder as he went, building to the Creation of Adam and, at the far altar end, the Separation of Light.
2
Walk the length of the map corridor
Find the stretch of Italy you know best and work out which wall it is on. Ignazio Danti laid the maps along the spine of the Apennines: the Tyrrhenian coast and the islands run down one wall, the Adriatic side down the other. Walking the hall is walking that ridge.
3
Circle the Laocoön for its lost arm
Before the chapel crowds, step into the octagonal Belvedere courtyard and stand before the Laocoön. Circle it to watch the struggle shift: the father's arched back, the sons pulling free, the serpent tightening. Then find the right arm, restored wrongly for centuries until the real bent one turned up in a Roman builder's yard.
4
Look straight down the spiral on the way out
Don't rush the double-helix staircase near the exit. Stand at the top railing and look straight down through the coiling ramp, then descend slowly along one side while other people rise on the other, never crossing paths. That is Giuseppe Momo's 1932 trick of two intertwined ramps in a single shaft.