Musei Vaticani, Rome

Musei Vaticani is the Vatican City’s public museum complex, though its entrance opens onto Italian territory along Viale Vaticano. Pope Julius the Second established this vast collection during the early sixteenth century. Its founding spark was a marble group unearthed in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore on January fourteenth, fifteen oh six: Laocoön and his sons caught in the coils of enormous serpents.

Julius sent Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo to inspect it, bought it on their advice, and put it on public view at the Vatican a month after its discovery. That decisive acquisition grew into an immense papal collection spanning ancient sculpture and major Renaissance painting. The route also carries you through Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s painted papal rooms.

There are twenty-four galleries altogether, and the Sistine Chapel is the final room on the museum route. Among the collections, the Vatican picture gallery includes works by Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio. The scale is extraordinary: roughly seventy thousand works belong here, with around twenty thousand displayed.