My Vatican visit or rather my visit to the museums, was booked online for a specific date and time. I had a grand plan for that day to fully explore the Vatican: the museums, St. Peter's Basilica with its square of the same name and the ascent to the observation point on the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. However, I only managed to eat a small piece of the pie – the Vatican Museums.
Advice: Don't even think about trying to see all the art collections gathered by the Catholic Church over 500 years in one go and encompass everything. If you are visiting on your own, allocate 5-6 hours just to see a portion of the museums.
To explore St. Peter's Basilica, an hour and a half to two hours is sufficient and the same amount of time for the ascent to the observation point on the dome.
I arrived at 8 am, much earlier than my appointment time, but I saw a huge queue stretching along the outer wall of the Vatican, far from the entrance to the museums. I decided that I wouldn't wait if I couldn't skip the line as promised by my city pass, which would definitely mean waiting for three hours under the intermittently falling rain.
I breathed a sigh of relief only when I saw the sign "entrance with city pass" right in front of the ticket offices and a short 10-minute queue caused by a brief delay at the metal detector.
Another 15 minutes passed to exchange my online ticket for a museum ticket. I didn't need the cloakroom, even though I had a camera bag with me. They fussed over my bag at the entrance to the museum. But I managed to convince them of its necessity. You can only take a small bag and a camera with you. So, with my camera around my neck and a guide tablet in my hand, I began my long and independent journey through the Vatican Museums.
Many museums were closed to visitors and some, like the Vatican Library, I didn't manage to visit due to my own oversight.
The tour of the museums starts from the terrace.
A brief diagram of the museums showed that I started my tour from the right, where the Pinacoteca is located.
The Vatican Museums are a complex of 26 museums founded by Pope Julius II at the beginning of the 16th century. On the territory of the museums, which are about five kilometers long, there are: 54 galleries, 1400 halls and 20 courtyards-museums and more than 60.000 works of art are stored here.
When you purchase a city pass, you are given a code for a guide that you can download to your phone or tablet from the internet for the museums and I did this at home. Therefore I navigated the museums comfortably, as I had a plan and information about the place.
Those without a guide can join any group in their own language, which is definitely not for me, moreover, tour groups visit the museums in 2-3 hours and skip many halls, unlike my 6-hour independent tour.
You can also purchase an audio guide at the ticket office for 7 euros, which needs to be pre-booked, but in this case, you will have to return from the Sistine Chapel back to the ticket offices, while my plan was to go directly to St. Peter's Basilica from the museums.
There are always a lot of people in the museums and it is impossible to see the exhibition in silence and peace.
During the visit, you must have an audio guide with you. Without it, it will be an empty and meaningless walk through the museums. And you will definitely miss very important relics, frescoes, paintings, sculptures that are included in the top 100 museums of the Vatican and that are the reason for visiting these museums.
I started the tour with the Ethnological and Pio-Christian Museums, where various sarcophagi decorated with reliefs and paintings on ancient themes are exhibited.
Advice: Don't linger here, there will be much more interesting things later and you won't have any strength left, it's even better not to stop here at all, as tour groups do.
The greatest value of the Pio-Christian Museum is the statue of the Good Shepherd, created in the 3rd century ad. The statue represents Jesus and the sacrifice he made for the salvation of people.
Next to visit is the Pinacoteca. Here, in 18 halls, about 460 paintings from the XII-XIX centuries are exhibited, where works by world-famous artists such as Raphael, Caravaggio, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci and others are displayed.
I would also like to briefly touch upon the history of St. Peter. St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican is named after him. The Apostle Peter is one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. He is considered the first Pope in the Catholic Church. Arrested in 42 ad by order of the King of Judea, Peter was imprisoned in Jerusalem. In 64 AD, he was crucified upside down at his own request, as he considered himself unworthy to die in the same way as his master.
The Historical Museum, which I did not manage to visit, contains a collection of weapons, uniforms of the Pope's armed forces, portraits of all the Popes and cars and carriages used by the Popes, called the Pope mobile. You can only visit this place by pre-booking a group tour.
An hour later, already tired from what I had seen and heard, I went out onto the terrace.
Entrance to the Vatican Gardens is only possible with a tour lasting 2 to 4 hours. Seeing the gardens and museums on the same day means not seeing either one or the other properly, I do not recommend it.
All the gardens are perfectly visible from the observation point on the dome of St. Peter's Basilica.
I moved to the other, main side of the Vatican Museums. The buildings of the museum complex are two to three stories high. The Courtyard of the Pine Cone got its name because of a four-meter ancient bronze gilded pine cone that adorned a fountain in ancient Rome. Until 1608 the pine cone was located on the Field of Mars, then it was moved to the Vatican and gave its name to an entire courtyard.
In the Belvedere Palace, the yellow building behind the pine cone, the Gregorian Museums are located: secular art; Etruscan. Egyptian. And the Pio-Clementino museum complex. To understand how large the museums are, it is enough to mention that the Egyptian Museum alone consists of nine halls and the others are not just one hall each.
Immediately after leaving the Vatican Museums, I went to the hotel and when I lay down to rest for an hour, I almost missed dinner, I overslept for a whole 4 hours.
The next day the last day, was very busy because I had to add the Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica and the ascent to its dome to the already full plan.