Tour Description:

The Vatican contains one of the largest and most significant collections of Ancient Greek and Romana Art and Italian Renaissance painting. The tour starts at the entrance of the museums with the worldwide famous Spiral Staircase. Then you will visit the Pinacoteca, the painting gallery, including masterpieces of Giotto, Perugino, Raphael, Caravaggio, and many others.

The tour continues to the collection of Classical sculptures, with the statue of Augustus of Primaporta, the Nile, the Apollo of the Belvedere, the Laocoon and the Apoxiomenos by Lysippus. The guide will take you to the Room of the Animals, the Hall of the Muses, the Circular Pavillon and the Greek-Cross Room exhibiting the Sarcophagi of St. Helen and her niece Constantina.

From here your will continue through other important sections of the museums, such as the Candelabra Gallery, with the famous statue of Diana from Ephesus, the Gallery of Tapistries and the Gallery of Geographical Maps before entering the Apostolic Building -the oldest part of the Vatican complex.

Here your guide will lead you through the former private quarters of Pope Julius II, splendidly adorned with artwork created by Raphael. These rooms, commonly known as the Rooms of Raphael, include celebrated masterpieces in all art history books as the Battle fo the Milvian Bridge, the Parnassus, the School of Athens and the Dispute.

Your visit goes on to the most famous fresco of the World: the Sistine Chapel. Its ceiling depicts scenes from Genesis in dramatic and moving detail, and The Last Judgment on the chapel's end wall is striking and powerful. In addition to these famous artworks, the side walls are covered with important Renaissance frescoes of Moses' and Christ's lives and contemporary popes by Perugino, Botticelli, Rosselli, Ghirlandaio and many others. But the Sistine Chapel is more than the sum of its artistic wonders: it is a symbolic statement of papal authority and the place in which papal elections in conclave are held to this day.

The tour ends in the Sistine Library, the library decorated by the best painters of late Renaissance for Pope Sistus V.