Vatican Museums

The Sistine Chapel is the climax of the Vatican Museums route but the galleries that lead to it are themselves extraordinary: the Octagonal Court alone contains the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, the Sarcophagus of St. Helena and dozens of other ancient sculptures that individually would anchor any major museum in the world, and the fact that they are arranged in a Roman courtyard rather than in glass cases makes the sculptures feel discovered rather than catalogued.

The Pinacoteca (painting gallery) occupies a separate building and contains works by Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Caravaggio and dozens of others, a collection that spans four centuries of European painting and which even a rapid pass-through takes two hours to begin to absorb, and the rooms are hung chronologically so the visitor walks through the entire history of European painting in a single visit.

The Gallery of Maps covers 120 metres of wall space with 16th-century frescoed maps of Italy, Sicily and Sardinia by Ignazio Danti — each one accurate enough to show individual towns and mountain ranges — and the effect is like being inside an enormous atlas whose pages stretch the full length of a cathedral, with the added dimension that the maps are painted in the same fresco technique as the walls so they are integral to the room rather than applied to it.

The Raphael Stanze (Rooms of Raphael) are the private papal apartments decorated by Raphael and his workshop between 1508 and 1524, and the School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura is arguably the single most recognisable Renaissance painting in the world, depicting Plato and Aristotle surrounded by the philosophers of antiquity in a composition whose spatial depth and figural variety was revolutionary in 1510 and remains genuinely surprising to see in the flesh.

The museums' spiral staircase — the staircase of the former private papal entrance — was designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932 and descends in a double helix that visitors exit through, and it is one of the most photographed pieces of architecture in the world precisely because it is both the last thing you see and the most visually satisfying, a spatial object that makes the act of leaving feel like a privilege rather than a relief.

The cumulative effect of the museums is disorienting in the most productive way: after the sixth gallery of sarcophagi and the fourth room of Flemish tapestries, the Sistine Chapel ceiling arrives as a kind of visual reset, the paintings so physically large and so far above the eye that they re calibrate your sense of what painting can do, and you emerge from the chapel back into the real world with a permanently altered understanding of the ambition of human artistic achievement.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling and Raphael's Stanze alone justify the visit, but the entire collection is one of the world's top five art collections.

The Gregorian Etruscan Museum and the Museums of Classical Antiquities contain some of the finest ancient Greek and Roman sculptures outside Athens or Rome's own museums.

The museums give access to the Sistine Chapel as the climax of a narrative route through Western art history.