My Europe Trip 2010 – Vatican City

Thanks to the holiday season I finally have some time to update on my almost-abandoned Europe trip series. Continued from Rome, this post about Vatican City would be a short one and more on photos because the experience was akin to visiting a humongous musuem.

So there is nothing much I could talk about. Plus, I am not a historian anyway. We spent a total of three nights in Rome and we actually visited Vatican City (it is located within Rome if you didn’t know already) on our second day.

There are a couple of ways you could reach Vatican City but the best way would be taking the metro. I highly recommend you to see the museums first because the queue could get freaking long (see pic above, and that’s only a quarter of the entire queue!) So, wake up early and get there early, by 9am at least.

If you are really desperate to skip the line, you could take up the so-called guided group tour for around €20 a pax if not mistaken. We were glad we did not purchase the guided group tour, as most of them still had to queue at the group line.

Vatican Museums is worth visiting because besides being one of the greatest in the world, it also houses the immense collection built up by the Roman Catholic Church since its foundation in the early 16th century. Millions of tourists throng the museum annually.

Thousands of statues and sculptures are on display. Even Egyptian mummies as well. If you were to inspect each and every item and learn about their histories, one whole day also wouldn’t be enough.

We simply followed the visiting route and looked at anything that appeared particularly interesting to us. If you are planning to visit the Vatican Museums I think you should first do a research and know what are the significant collections to see when you reach.

Beautiful frescos painted with immaculate details on the ceilings and walls inside the museum. Pretty jaw-dropping stuff if you see them in real, I snapped like crazy here.

Walking along the Vatican Museums’ many corridors, heavily decorated with paintings and frescoes.

These frescoes in actual size are even larger than an adult, can you imagine?

At the west side of the Belvedere Courtyard is The Gallery of Maps consisting of 40 panels stretching as long as 120m. The large scale frescoes depicts regions in Italy and their respective perspective view of the most prominent cities.

Sistine Chapel is undoubtedly the most popular attraction in the Vatican, featuring Michaelangelo’s masterpiece The Last Judgement on the ceiling, which was restored more than 20 years ago. The ceiling is amazing, just surreal. However, this place is overly crowded compared to the other sections in the museums so watch your belongings.

Plenty of signs lead visitors to the Sistine Chapel, which is accessible through the vast labryinth, which also serves as the highlight at the end of the tour. Do note that although flashless photograhy is allowed in the museums, it is strictly prohibited here. If you are caught photographing anything in the Sistine Chapel you would be led out immediately by the museum personnels, no questions asked. But I took my chances.

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