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The first
The museums began with one sculpture found in a vineyard
The museums trace their origin to a single marble sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons, discovered on 14 January 1506 in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore. Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo to examine it, bought it at once, and put it on public display exactly one month after its discovery.
The size
Second only to the Louvre for visitors
The museums hold roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, in 24 galleries. In 2024 they were visited by 6.8 million people, which ranked them second among the most visited art museums in the world, after the Louvre.
6.8 millionvisitors in 2024, second only to the Louvre
The route
The Sistine Chapel is the last room on the route
The visitor route passes the Raphael Rooms, which hold many works by Raphael and his workshop, including The School of Athens. The Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling and altar wall decorated by Michelangelo, is the last room visited.
The maps
A gallery with all of Italy painted on its walls
The Gallery of Maps shows topographical maps of the whole of Italy, painted on the walls by the friar Ignazio Danti of Perugia for Pope Gregory XIII. It remains the world's largest pictorial geographical study.
The stair
A double spiral that is really a ramp
The Bramante Staircase is a double spiral staircase designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932. It is a double helix of shallow incline, a stepped ramp rather than a true staircase, around a stairwell about fifteen metres wide.
Day 2, morning
Next is St. Peter's Basilica.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Vatican Museums, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.