Private Tour of Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St. Peter's

Make the most of your experience of the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s Rooms by exploring the Vatican Museums properly with our Vatican private tour

Expand your story embracing the innovations of the Italian Renaissance, which changed the world also for us. The 15th century is the age of great inventions, of the rise of critical and scientific thinking, and of expressive freedom. It’s the time when printing revolutionizes the spread of knowledge: medieval manuscripts, rare and reserved for the few, are replaced by the modern book, more accessible and able to spread ideas, knowledge, and new visions of the world like never before. More accurate maps are also created, based on scientific observation, allowing great navigators, like Christopher Columbus, to reach beyond known borders.

One of the most striking representations of these new visions is the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums, part of your private Vatican tour: a long corridor frescoed in the late 16th century with the maps of Italy’s regions, an extraordinary example of the ambition to represent and understand the world in a systematic way.

At the heart of this new era, Michelangelo expresses a renewed centrality of the human being. His famous ignudi, monumental nudes painted between 1508 and 1512 on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, over 20 meters above ground, celebrate the dignity and beauty of the human body. Twenty years later, the artist returns to the chapel to fresco the immense wall of the Last Judgment, a dramatic and powerful vision and the apex of the Renaissance, on which our guide will focus during your Vatican tour.

Explore, with your qualified English-speaking guide, the historic rooms and courtyards of the Vatican Museums, understanding when and why they were built, why the collections of Greco-Roman art were so important to Renaissance culture, and how they can be just as moving for you. Enter the world of great classical works with a private Vatican tour tailored to your interests, discovering the Greek myths of gods and heroes that the statues embody, and experiencing the decisive moment in their stories, the most dramatic and irreversible instant when their fate takes a new direction. This moment, full of tension and possibility, has always attracted artists, who have conveyed through their representations the collective visions and values of their time.

Moreover, many of the Vatican Museum masterpieces included in your Vatican treasures experience are the very same ones that Michelangelo and Raphael studied and loved unconditionally five centuries ago, drawing enormous inspiration for their respective creations of the Sistine Chapel and Raphael Rooms. And it will be amazing to trace, in your private Vatican Museums tour, the direct influence of these works on their creations, thanks to the insights provided by our expert in art history.

Why the Vatican Museums are really unique and are worth a strategic visit!

Vatican Museums have not only incomparable art collections, they are art themselves: the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Rooms - to mention only the most famous - are inseparable from the walls on which they were painted, fixed forever on the plaster still fresh with the fresco technique, compelling and risky at the same time, because of the speed of execution that requires. Both Michelangelo and Raphael worked in the Vatican Palaces for years in order to make them, often a few blocks away from each other, but as far as we know, carefully avoiding crossing each other. Yet these areas of the Vatican palaces were their homes, their dreams, their destinies for years.

The Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Rooms were worksites of ideas, of intuitions, of ingenuity where, with our guide, you can observe and understand the figures Michelangelo and Raphael created, looking at them from different angles, like them from a thousand angles to infer details and unexpected meanings. Step by step it will become then clear how the two great geniuses of the Renaissance first, but as all other artists in general, have worked hard to make their weightless creations more vibrant and expressive of men in flesh and blood, in short, to make them a condensation of humanity, huge mirrors in which the visitor identifies himself in the gestures and actions of those figures, investigates human nature, questioning himself about happiness and death.

Appropriately addressed by our guide you will be able to meet the gaze of some of the characters in the frescoes, waiting for centuries to renew the miracle of an agreement beyond time, with the viewer who looks at them. Through them, you will experience contact with their brilliant creators, who in their works have revealed their deepest feelings: it will be kind of shaking hands with Michelangelo or looking into his eyes.

Our tour shows you an unexpected Vatican: the pleasure of living

The men of the Renaissance were as fortunate as daring, but they lived a period of incomparable innovation and extraordinary creativity despite the passing of the plague and the many local wars. Many Italian cities - including Florence and Venice - were incredibly rich, bankers and merchants built luxurious houses for themselves, wore fashionable dresses made of precious fabrics, and their courts gathered artists, architects and writers who, attracted by the exuberance, were transforming the cities and art forever. In little more than a century that goes from the birth of Leonardo da Vinci to the death of Michelangelo, printing was invented with the publication in 1455 of the first books as we know them today. Trade routes are opened to reach the Indies and China thanks to the scientific creation of accurate geographical maps without which Christopher Columbus would never have embarked on his journey ending up not finding what he expected but discovering America. In our tour we will immerse you in the life of the Renaissance, in the splendour that reached the Vatican courts, making you experience in first person the unbridled passion for ancient works, for dinners with flowing vintage wine, for loves that are not always canonical, and furious quarrels between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo. In this way, immersed in the things and dreams of artists, popes and bankers of the Renaissance, you’ll be able to understand the immense masterpieces housed in the Vatican Museums, works that are anything but intellectual, that were made to speak to the heart.

Enjoy selected masterpieces along the mandatory route to the Sistine Chapel 

The Museums consist of a succession of historic buildings and courtyards within Vatican City that were opened to the public less than a century ago. The shorter itinerary that leads to the Sistine Chapel and Raphael's Rooms is a must, winding through luxurious palaces and courtyards that are architecturally amazing and full of history. The collections are immense with an extraordinarily high number of real masterpieces. It would be easy to get lost and pass unaware a few meters from unmissable masterpieces, survivors and witnesses of buried worlds. With our qualified guide, you'll discover a selection of works of art to get to the Sistine Chapel with trained and agile eyes and mind, ready for a sublime experience. Much of the classical works of Ancient Rome that you will see with our guide are those that Michelangelo and Raphael loved, studied, and whose beauty they challenged. Transform your visit to the Vatican Museums into a conscious treasure of images and ideas that we have absorbed over the centuries, but of which we are often completely unaware. 

Discover the art and personality of Michelangelo on our Sistine Chapel tour

Immerse yourself with our tour in the expressive power of the prophets Jonah and Ezekiel, in the beauty of the Creation of Adam and in other stories of the Bible, painted by Michelangelo in the vault of the Sistine Chapel at a height of 20 meters. Learn with our knowledgeable guide how and with what creativity and resilience Michelangelo worked tirelessly for 4 years at the Sistine Chapel, mastering the fresco technique and enlarging  his figures up to 4 meters high to capture our eyes and touch our hearts.

Admire the great statues of Greek art (from Laocoon and His Sons to Apollo Belvedere) and discover their amazing stories

In our tour, designed to optimize your experience of the Vatican Museums, enjoy the expressions of famous statues, symbols of Greek culture, whose children we are, from the drama of the priest Laocoon entangled, together with his two sons, by snakes for revealing the truth, to the ideal beauty of the Apollo of Belvedere.

Tour the Raphael Rooms and absorb the experience

Take part in the festival of ideas and passion of the School of Athens, the most famous fresco in the Raphael Rooms, where the great Greek philosophers are waiting for you. Our expert will tell you who they are and why many of them are looking like Raphael's contemporary artists, dressed in rich Florentine garments of the XVI century.

Discover the great works of the Pinacoteca (Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Caravaggio)

Don't miss the experience of the Pinacoteca of the Vatican Museums - ignored by the tourist itineraries - with the only one painting in Rome by Leonardo da Vinci, because of the intense and suffering expression of his Saint Jerome, to know how to grasp it, is like a four-way chat eyes with Leonardo, a genius both in art and in science. The two stories of Raphael's unfinished Transfiguration, in which Christ, revealing his divine nature, rises weightlessly are made to surprise the beholder (and therefore you too). They made the bystanders cry at the celebration, which took place in the Pantheon, of the funeral of Raphael, who died unexpectedly and in a few days at 37 years of age. Also in the Pinacoteca awaits you the Deposition of Christ by Caravaggio, Mary and the other figures, strong and clear, like everything that the brilliant artist did in his life, take you to the lacerating moment in which I place the body of Christ in the tomb

Tour St. Peter’s Basilica: 2000 years of art to celebrate the faith 

Reach St. Peter's Basilica directly from the Sistine Chapel with a special passage reserved for official guides without a queue to retrace the crucial events of its millennial history of faith and power witnessed by great works of art. Discover through the precise and suggestive narration of one of our guides where St. Peter was buried, when and why that place became the heart of the church wanted by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century., How many projects and artists participated more than a thousand years later in the construction of the new Basilica with an undertaking that lasted 120 years. Special attention will be dedicated on the tour inside St. Peter's Basilica to Michelangelo's Pietà for the emotional density, for the infinite meanings and the deep intimacy that binds Mary to the dead Christ that she holds in her arms and legs, inviting us to reflect on the mystery of death (and life).