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The Vatican Museums are home to over nine miles of art, much of which is never seen by the general public, either for timing or access reasons. Delve deeper into the Vatican Museums than ever before with this Extended Vatican Tour that takes you where the public can’t usually go and visits more general access areas of the museums than a classic Vatican tour.
This special access Skip the Line tour crosses velvet ropes to gain rare access to the famous Bramante Staircase, a dizzying spiral of carved stone built in 1512 inside a square tower. It once bore the weight of horses, but few ever set foot on it these days, making this visit particularly special.A sure highlight of the tour will be the beautiful paintings of the Vatican Pinacoteca painting gallery, including Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’, Caravaggio’s ‘Deposition from the Cross’ and Leonardo Da Vinci’s sunfinished ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’ .On top of that we’ll visit all the general access rooms covered in our basic Vatican Museums tour, from the Pinecone Courtyard to the Gallery of Tapestries, the Gallery of the Maps, the Gallery of the Candelabra and a highlight of any tour – the Raphael Rooms. Of course your tour also includes the Vatican Museums’ most famous room, a room whose threshold has a higher footfall than the museums themselves because so many visitors come twice.
Over the course of your tour, your guide will have described the works in here, explaining with the aid of photos and drawings,what each section means so that when you arrive here – at the Sistine Chapel – you’ll have time to yourself to take it all in.The last stop on our extended tour takes you through a special door in the Sistine Chapel and past another long queue to gain access to St. Peter’s Basilica. Every day but Wednesday (when the Papal Audience often means that the Basilica is closed) you’ll have a guided tour inside this colossal building – one of the most important in all of Christianity and home to Michelangelo’s famous sculpture, ‘La Pieta’.
This Extended Vatican Museums Tour is perfect for art-lovers and visitors with an interest in seeing a littlemore of what the Vatican Museums have to offer. With Skip the Line Access you won’t have to waste your precious time, and small group sizes of 20 people or less mean that your visit will be intimate, your passage around the museums seamless, and your guide easy to interact with.
