Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel: Skip-The-Line Entry Ticket

The Saints Tour at the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel offers something very unique and privileged.

Entrance to the Vatican Museums is shared access.

In a quiet, relaxed environment, your guide shares stories and elements that bring to life the historical, artistic, and cultural background for understanding masterpieces in the Hall of the Muses, Pio-Clementine Museum, Gallery of Maps, Gallery of Tapestries, Raphael Rooms plus viewing the splendid Courtyard of the Pinecone located in very heart of Vatican City.

Begun in the Sistine Chapel, it is there that travelers see works deemed by many as an ultimate expression of Italian Renaissance art.

The beautiful frescoes inside were designed by artists among the most famous in history-Botticelli, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Luca Signorelli, and Piero di Cosimo-all sharing space with Michelangelo's fantastic ceiling above and on the wall his dynamic late work of the Last Judgment.

Pope Julius II founded the Vatican Museums in 1506 with one statue, the marble group of Laocoon.

This Gallery of Maps is 120 meters long and shows the shape of the Apennines; on the left are regions by the Tyrrhenian Sea while on the right are those facing the Adriatic.

In Raphael's School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura, the philosophers take on the guise of his contemporary artists.

Bramante serves as the face of Euclid; Plato displays the solemn features of Leonardo.

Heraclitus takes on the scowling aspect of Michelangelo-his famously shadowy nature was well known.

Very much front and center are Buonarroti's notorious boots-worn even in bed.

In the Sistine Chapel, inside the Last Judgment, there is a picture of Michelangelo where Buonarroti put his face in the skin that St.

Bartholomew is holding.

Right now, all meetings before choosing a new pope happen in this chapel.