The Vatican Museums began with a single statue. In 1506 the ancient Laocoön was dug from a Roman vineyard; Pope Julius II bought it within weeks and set it on public view, and a collection was born. Five centuries of popes filled the rooms that followed — roughly seven kilometres of galleries running from Egyptian mummies and Etruscan gold through Raphael's frescoed apartments and a corridor of painted maps. Every path bends toward one small room: the Sistine Chapel, built for Sixtus IV in the 1470s and first painted along its walls by Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio.
You shuffle for over an hour past gilded ceilings and crowded marble halls before the doors open onto the chapel, where guards hush the room and cameras go down. Above you spreads Michelangelo's ceiling: nine scenes from Genesis, painted standing on scaffolding between 1508 and 1512, with the near-touching fingers of God and Adam at its heart. On the altar wall his later Last Judgment swirls with hundreds of figures. A cleaning late in the twentieth century lifted away centuries of candle soot, and the colours came back shockingly bright — pinks and greens most visitors never knew were there.