Vatican Museum & Sistine Chapel Information
The enormous Vatican Museums complex is composed of more than two
dozen distinct collections, 
any of which could be a self-sustaining
gallery. Outlined below is information on the Vatican to help plan your time in the museums.
The Vatican museums are a testament to the power of papal art patronage and
curatorial talent. For your information, the Vatican museum has a one-way system to prevent visitors
from getting side-tracked in the maze of rooms, stairways and courtyards.
However, you can be selective within this framework or choose to follow
one of four color-coded 
itineraries. Each itinerary, however, culminates
in the Sistine Chapel.
As you begin your tour you will pass through the Egyptian Museum, where
an underground tomb-chamber of the Valley of the Kings is reproduced,
and then make your way through the long, sweeping corridor that forms
the Chiaramonti Museum, a virtual warehouse of prepossessing busts of
ancient Romans and fine copies of classical Greek works.
The sculpture
of antiquity is also the focus of the Pio- Clementine Museum, which
contains such masterpieces as the elegant Apollo Belvedere, the Lacoon
Group and the Belvedere Torso. From here you can wind your way into
the Etruscan Museum or continue on to the Rooms of the Greek Originals,
filled with 5th and 4th Century BC Statues and parts of the original
decoration of the Parthenon. Covering the walls of the Gallery of Tapestries
are enormous, expressive masterpieces of weaving based on cartoons by
the pupils of Raphael. The Gallery of Maps is covered with frescoes
that serve as an important record of 16th Century geography and cartography.
The required viewing of the Vatican Museums include the Raphael's Stanze,
where young Raphael made his mark; the tiny Chapel of Nicholas V with
exquisite frescoes by Fra Angelico; the Borgia Apartment which offers
a virtual one-man show by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio. A stroll
through the Collection of Modern Religious Art will get you back in
the 20th Century. The hundred of works by such artists as Rodin, Chagall
Munch etc., provide proof that this subject is still persisting in modern
art. The elaborately decorated Vatican Library is also considered part
of the museum with more than a million books and prints.
Finally, no
tour is complete without a visit to the 15 rooms of the Picture Gallery
or Pinacoteca, which provide a fine survey of Italian Painting ranging
from the Primitives of the 11 and 12 Century, the Florentine masters,
to the painters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
You will know immediately when you have 
reached the Sistine Chapel,
because not only everyone is in the room standing with his eyes turned
toward the ceiling, but there is an amazing hush that descends as you
enter.
Although the walls of the Sistine Chapel are covered with paintings
by a number of Renaissance masters, including Botticelli and Ghirlandaio,
they become secondary in the company of Michelangelo's extraordinary
fresco covering the great vaulted ceiling. Also in this rooms, on the
wall behind the altar, is his sweeping fresco The Last Judgment.
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