What to see in the Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums are one of the largest collections of works of art in the world and when you visit Rome you have a few hours to visit them given the incredible amount of attractions of the capital.

To optimize the time of the visit, we recommend purchasing tickets online to allow you to skip the long lines.
The 10 must-see attractions inside the Vatican Museums are: the Sistine Chapel, the Raphael Rooms, the Gallery of Geographical Maps, the Pinacoteca, the Pio-Clementino Museum, the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, the Carriage Pavilion, the Museum Ethnological, the collection of contemporary art, the spiral staircase.

The Sistine Chapel

The most famous part of the Vatican Museums is the Sistine Chapel, one of the absolute masterpieces of modern art.
There are Michelangelo's frescoes of the Creation of Adam and the Last Judgment and works by Pietro Perugino, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Raphael Rooms

The Raphael Rooms, also known as the Vatican Rooms, are four rooms frescoed by the great painter from Urbino who painted them with his pupils.
The most famous is the Stanza della Segnatura where the four branches of knowledge are depicted: Theology, Philosophy, Justice and Poetry.

Gallery of Geographic Maps

One of the most beautiful and evocative parts of the Vatican Museums is certainly the long corridor of 120 meters in length and six in width that leads to the Sistine Chapel adorned with geographical maps.
The walls of the gallery are covered with forty geographical maps of the various Italian regions, with maps of the main cities.

The Pinacoteca

18 rooms positioned in chronological order with paintings ranging from the Middle Ages to 1800 with 460 paintings of masterpieces by the likes of Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Perugino and Caravaggio.

The Pio-Clementino Museum

The Pio Clementino Museum consists of 12 rooms with sculptures from the Greek and Roman periods. Among these you can admire the Roman copy of a Greek statue in bronze, the work of Lysippus, considered the first sculpture of Greek art.
In the Octagonal Courtyard, among the most famous statues you can see, there is the Apollo of the Belvedere and the famous Laocoon Group.

The Gregorian Egyptian Museum

9 rooms that collect monuments and artifacts of ancient Egypt from Rome and Villa Adriana (Tivoli). The last three rooms instead host works from ancient Mesopotamia and Assyria.

The Carriage Pavilion

For fans of historic vehicles, the Carriage Pavilion is located in the Papal Apartment of the Lateran Apostolic Palace, in a detached section of the Historical Museum.
It preserves saddles, carriages and cars used by various popes.

The Museum Ethnological

Inside the Ethnological Museum there is a very varied collection with about 80,000 objects, from prehistoric finds from all over the world and dating back to over two million years ago, to the gifts given to the current Pontiff.

The collection of contemporary art

9 rooms with over 8,000 works including paintings, sculptures and graphics, by important names including Van Gogh, de Chirico, Chagall, Bacon, Capogrossi, Carrà, Manzù, Fontana, Burri and Matisse.

The spiral staircase

At the end of the museum there is the spectacular double spiral spiral staircase. It was designed in 1932 by Giuseppe Momo and its peculiarity is that it does not allow those who go down to meet those who go up.