WALK THREE

Vatican Museum. See other pages for the rest of Walk 3: Sistine Chapel -- St Peter’s -- Castel St Angelo -- Via dei Coronari -- Santa Maria della Pace

VATICAN MUSEUM

This morning’s schedule will cover two of Rome’s most important historic highlights: the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s. You really don’t want to be staying at a hotel near the Vatican, which is too far from the center for most activities, so rather than walk to the museum you can easily get there by taxi or metro. If several people are sharing a taxi, this is certainly the best way to get to the museum. Roman cab drivers are honest and knowledgeable about best routes: remember to tip ten percent for good service.

First, some logistical warnings about the crowding (you can beat it).

The crushing crowding inside the museum has reached a point of near-torture, so get here when it opens to minimize the pain. Attendance has increasing exponentially but the museum is still the same size as ever. Yes, it is very big, but mobs of people seem to fill up every square inch. It has gotten extremely popular in recent years as tourism continues to increase in record numbers throughout Italy.

There is always a very long line waiting to get in. If you are here during the peak season, which is most of the year (except winter and August), you should consider arranging your schedule to arrive at the Vatican first thing in the morning to beat the crowd. The ticket office opens at 9:00am, but some pay extra to enter early, so it might not be empty at official opening. You should order tickets with a reserved entry time at the Vatican web site which will cost only a few extra dollars for the booking.

If you get there are at midmorning it’s too late: there will be a massive line, perhaps one mile long and five people wide, requiring 2 hours waiting. By the time you get through the door it will be midafternoon, you are exhausted, hungry and facing maximum crowds inside. Or you could be waiting so long that when you reach the ticket window they have closed -- at 4:00pm they shut the door.

Metro service is pretty convenient, only requiring a ten-minute walk from the station to the museum. Take Line A in the direction of Battistini (station at the end of the line). If you are traveling early in the morning it will be rush hour, so you probably won’t get a seat; and in any crowded place you want to be careful about pickpockets (best defense is a safety pin sealing your pocket). You can ride either to Ottaviano or one more stop to Cipro. Either way will put you within a few blocks of the Vatican Museum, but the former is probably better if you are expecting to wait on line, because with proper navigating, turning left on Via Leone, you will more easily reach the end of the line. Better, take a taxi right to the Vatican Museum entrance.

Treasures of the Museum

While the Vatican Museum is most famous for the Sistine Chapel, it also contains many great statues and paintings from ancient times right up through the Renaissance. You cannot see everything, of course, and what you pick depends on your own personal interests. Unfortunately, some visitors treat the museum like a long inconvenient hallway that leads to the Sistine Chapel and they don’t pay sufficient attention to the many great art treasures they pass by. They even have signs posted with arrows that lead you on the shortest route to the Sistine Chapel that will bypass some important galleries, but if you simply follow those arrows you’ll miss out on many interesting sights.

Of course, readers of this website want to see things in-depth, so we will provide suggestions to help you get the most out of your visit, ending with a thorough look at the Sistine Chapel and exit from its back door straight into St. Peter’s.

After passing through the entry turnstiles, a long escalator will bring you up to a central lobby area which offers several choices of direction. If you need a toilet or bite to eat, turn right, then left and walk downstairs to the cafeteria level, although you will have other toilet choices during the visit. From the adjacent outdoor terrace, one can enjoy a fine view of St. Peter’s dome.

The museum’s painting gallery of Old Masters, the Pinacoteca, is found at the beginning of the route just beyond the stairs to the cafeteria. Decide now if you want to see the pictures, because the route will not come back this way again if you exit from the Sistine Chapel into St. Peter’s at the conclusion of your visit, as recommended.

You could quickly walk through the small series of galleries in about 15 or 20 minutes, enjoying several important masterpieces along the way, while skipping past a lot of other mediocre canvases. It contains important paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio and Raphael, along with a few fascinating statues including a full-sized copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta and several small terra-cotta models of angels created by Bernini, hidden away in a little side room.

The Vatican post office is also in this wing of the building and makes a good place to mail your postcards. Not only will you have a uniquely distinctive postmark from the Vatican, but their service is a little quicker than the Italian post office and it’s conveniently located right here near the front entrance. You can buy a selection of postcards, but curiously there is one line for postcards only and another line if you want postcards with stamps, so get on the proper line. Write a quick note and mail it within the Vatican in their convenient mailboxes. If you mail it in Rome it will not go anywhere because the stamps only work when mailed in the Vatican.

There is a wonderful spiral staircase next to the post office that was formerly the main entrance, but now nobody ever sees it because it’s tucked away on the side and roped off so you cannot use it. The view is obstructed on the post office side by a ramp, so walk around the spiral for a minute to get a clear look down into the dizzying perspective and take some great photos.

Upon entering the main area of the museum you’ll walk into the large, outdoor Pinecone Courtyard (Cortile della Pigna), named after the huge bronze pinecone sculpture you see in the building alcove on your left. This 11-foot-high statue of a pinecone, with two bronze peacocks on either side, was originally a fountain with many holes for spraying water and dates back over 2000 years. After being dug out of the ground in early archaeological excavations, it stood in front of the original St. Peter’s Basilica in the 12th century and was later relocated to this grand courtyard. In the distance you’ll see a huge bronze head, believed to be that of Constantine.

Follow the crowd through the door on the other side of this courtyard, then look right where you will see a very long gallery filled with portrait busts, the Museo Chiaramonti.

You may want to snap a cheesy photo of yourself standing next to one of the Roman emperors or philosophers, but there is no need to walk the entire length of this long gallery. [On the other hand, if you are very eager and want to see everything, you would be rewarded with a view of an important statue of the Emperor Augustus at the far end around the corner, but really, this is a lot of work to see statues that all look alike. This long gallery has about 2000 ancient Roman statues, mostly depicting various noblemen who commissioned artists to carve their portraits in marble.]

Continuing on the main route, turn left after entering from the Pinecone Courtyard and walk up the little staircase (convenient toilet half-way along it) leading into the first of many connected galleries. The centerpiece is a statue of an ancient Roman athlete cleaning himself, getting ready for the games by scraping oil and sand off his muscular body. There is a window in this room which provides a beautiful view over the city, very similar to the panorama you would get if you made the difficult, heroic effort to climb up to the top of the dome of St. Peter’s, but here you are at about the same height as the top of the dome. Sweet deal: same view, no steps. You’ll see the Pantheon, the Monument to Victor Emanuele, Castel Sant Angelo and many other recognizable landmarks of the city framed in a landscape of clay tile roofs that extends to the horizon. Another fine sight in the back corner of this gallery is a spiral staircase designed by Bramante, seen through windows of the doorway, but unfortunately, for some unknown reason this is usually roped off and you cannot get close to it.

Continue into the adjacent Belvedere Octagonal Court which displays two of the most important statues from classical antiquity and a variety of other interesting pieces in a beautifully-designed indoor/outdoor area.

The Apollo Belvedere in the first niche on your left is a perfect statue (even if missing both arms), one of the finest pieces of art ever created. It’s over 2000 years old, a Roman version of a Greek original that was probably carved around the third century BC in the Hellenistic style. Originally, Apollo was holding a bow and has just fired his arrow, though those parts are conspicuously absent today and need to be filled in by our imagination. Walk behind to see the quiver and perfectly finished rear portion of the piece.

It has such grace embodied in the flowing motion of its fabric, realistic muscles and that beautiful Classical face. It shows that sculpture had reached a state of perfection 2000 years ago. One can’t do any better than this today. Some might conclude that our culture has gone downhill in the last 2000 years, considering how bizarre modern sculpture can get.

The most important statue is across the courtyard, the Laocoon, one of the greatest creations in the history of art. This piece is more than 2000 years old, so some of its history is uncertain, but most likely it was created by a Greek sculptor from the island of Rhodes; perhaps it was carved here in Rome, maybe created in the Greek islands and brought here by ship along with several thousand other statues the Romans stole from that island in antiquity.

Laocoon is the central figure with his two sons on either side, all being crushed to death by snakes because they offended the God Apollo in a legend set during the Trojan War when Laocoon supposedly warned the people of Troy not to allow that big wooden horse into their city. The gods supporting the Greek attackers killed Laocoon and his sons to keep them quiet. This scene is warning the viewer not to violate the gods lest you be punished with death.

This statue was forgotten and buried under the earth until 1509, discovered accidentally, but recognized as a well-known missing statue from antiquity. Michelangelo and Raphael, who reportedly helped to unearth the sculpture, were astonished to find such a piece of marble perfection. Though creating their own great carvings and paintings, they were humbled and inspired by the Laocoon. They were struck by the statue’s explosive energy, extremely realistic muscular stress, asymmetric composition, physical beauty and perfection of form. The incredibly vivid interplay of writhing arms, legs, snakes and curves makes this one of the finest statues ever created. When you look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling you can actually see that Michelangelo adopted some of these poses and movements and put them in some of his characters.

Also in this court, see whether you can find Bacchus; you can always recognize him with the grapes, the wineglass and grape leaves growing out of his hair, this Roman god of wine and merriment. Another fine statue depicts Perseus holding the head of Medusa covered in snakes, a classical story from antiquity, carved by Canova in the early 19th century. He was a sculptor from Venice who did a lot of work in Rome and Florence, and for a while he was actually appointed director of the Vatican Museum. During that time he not only carved several of the statues on display here, including two boxers flanking Medusa, but also designed the Belvedere Court as a statue gallery.

Leave the Belvedere Court and enter the Hall of the Animals, a petrified zoo with beautiful marble statues of various animals from throughout the Roman Empire. Many of these figures represent legendary heroes and gods, such as Mithras, the Persian God shown sacrificing the bull. Hopefully you will be lucky and the Hall of Animals will be fully open on the day you are visiting. Occasionally the animal gallery is closed and you can only walk through it in a narrow, chained passage, but other days it is wide open and you can explore it fully. It just depends on the scheduling, staffing and day of the week that you get here.

An adjacent exhibition room sometimes open at the far end of the animal collection is the large Gallery of Statues, definitely worth your time. This superb architectural setting of arches, columns, painted ceiling and marble draped like fabric, contains many busts of emperors and notables which show how the ancient Romans were experts in portraiture.

Next, you arrive at the Hall of the Muses whose centerpiece is the Belvedere Torso, one of the most important statues to come down to us from the first century BC. It probably depicts Hercules, as you might deduce from the muscular body and hint of lion skin draped on the shoulder, though we don’t have any head, arms or legs remaining for conclusive proof. Michelangelo was so impressed by this statue that he called himself a “student of the torso” and may have transplanted these washboard abs to Christ in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment. This large gallery with beautiful high ceiling covered with colorful paintings was constructed specifically to display this one statue in its center.

Salla Rotunda is the next room, seemingly a mini-Pantheon with coffered dome ceiling and round floor. The colorful mosaics on the floor are from an ancient Roman palace and suggest a dining area with its baskets of fruit, broccoli and other foods placed among various heroic figures. More than 1 million tiny stones were used to create these vivid mosaics so painstakingly reconstructed to create this fine floor that some visitors might not even notice, since the room also has many fine statues and a huge basin in the middle made of the red stone poryphery. This giant 2000 year old bowl came from the Golden Palace of Nero where it was probably a fountain, or maybe a giant punch bowl filled with wine served at bacchanalian revels. Its huge size is in keeping with the scale of Nero’s Palace, which measured almost a mile and was probably the largest residence ever built in ancient Rome.

On your right you will see a portrait bust of Hadrian, one of the greatest of all Roman emperors, who ruled in the early part of the second century. Next to him is Antinuos, his young lover who tragically drowned while on an expedition to the Nile. Grief-stricken Hadrian had Antinuos deified, then memorialized with hundreds of statues like this displayed all over the empire. Notice the big bronze statue of Hercules high above, originally covered in gold.

Continue into the next room, with the grand staircases on the far side and a couple of Egyptian-type statues holding up the door you just walked through. Most importantly, notice the two large sarcophagi that once held the remains of Constantine’s daughter Constance, on the right, and his mother St. Helen, on the left, one of Catholicism’s most important Catholic saints because she converted to Christianity and was a major influence in his later conversion. Ironically, her sarcophagus is covered with relief sculpture of battle scenes even though she was a lady of peace.

Visitors keenly interested in Egyptian art might detour through the door on left into the series of galleries with artifacts that include jewelry, small statues, and a mummy. However, this is a rather small collection that does not really fit in with the rest of the Vatican treasures that are all focused upon Italy, even though Rome did occupy Egypt for several centuries from the time of Augustus. Skip it unless you are really keen on seeing pieces from old Egypt.

Rooms of the Candelabra, Tapestries, and Maps

Walk up the stairs and into the next long section of the Vatican Museum, beginning in the Room of the Candelabra which contains many ancient statues, the oldest of which are two marble candleholders which give this room its name. There’s a fertility goddess, showing off dozens of breasts, and a few marble statues with original eyes still in place. Most of these statues were originally painted in bright colors and skin tones and had glass eyes bringing them to life.

Next is the tapestry gallery featuring large biblical scenes based on the paintings of Raphael and woven by Flemish artisans and Belgium, Europe’s most important weaving center. Look for the most famous element in this room, found in the large tapestry in the center of the left wall: the eyes of Christ follow you as you walk by.

Pass into the adjoining gallery of maps, with an astonishing ceiling of painted stucco sculpture above and wall-filling murals of maps of the Vatican territories in Italy. These extravagant frescoes depict the different towns, islands and regions controlled by the Vatican. The beautiful ceiling was painted just after Michelangelo in the late 16th century using a Mannerist style. Visitors coming to see the pope would usually walk through this long Gallery of Maps and be suitably impressed by the vast territories that were owned and occupied by the Church.

If ropes don’t barricade the windows, you might get some cooling views over the Pope’s garden on the right side. Notice the many posters displaying the upcoming Sistine Chapel ceiling, if you did not get a close look earlier in that superior lighted display in the entrance lobby. You can skip the little book stand because there is a good gift shop at the end of your visit.

Try and maneuver your way quickly through the two large crowded halls at the end because you want to get into the rooms of Raphael, called the “Stanze,” where the great genius created his most impressive murals. A path takes you outside the building and when you re-enter, you find yourself in the Hall of Constantine which depicts the Battle of the Milvan Bridge where Constantine saw the sign of the true cross in his battle against Maxentius. The voice of God spoke to Constantine and told him “in this sign you will conquer”. This miracle inspired his belief in Christ and the Emperor went on to legalize Christianity, a most significant decision in Western history memorialized in the turbulent scenario all around you. The murals were probably designed by Raphael, who died before it was painted in the mid-16th century. Raphael’s actual work is coming right up, but along the way check to see whether the little chapel of Nicholas V is open (generally not so), for a glimpse of brilliant, early Renaissance frescoes by Fra Angelico and other Florentine painters.

ROOMS OF RAPHAEL

Now you will enter three of the most important rooms in the museum, the Stanze di Raffaello, (Rooms of Raphael) with a dozen large paintings of various religious, historical and philosophical scenes. These were the private quarters of Pope Julius II, who hired Raphael to decorate them in 1508. First is the Room of Heliodorus with four large panels: The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, Mass at Bolsena, Deliverence of St. Peter, and Meeting of Leo and Attila.

Next room contains the absolute masterpiece of this collection and Raphael’s most famous single work representing history’s great philosophers, scientists, artists and thinkers, The School of Athens. In the center we see the two principal figures, Plato and Aristotle, with a lot happening around them to symbolize the various themes of Greek philosophy. Plato the Idealist points up to the world of thought and ideal forms, while Aristotle points down to the physical world and material life.

There are many other characters from world history represented in the painting, such as Michelangelo in the front. Ironically, this was a time when he was Raphael’s great rival at the Vatican, Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Raphael working in these rooms. Though he was not getting along with Michelangelo, Raphael was so overwhelmed by the magnificence of Buonarroti’s creation that he paid him the great compliment by putting him in The School of Athens. Raphael didn’t forget to acknowledge himself either: He placed his self-portrait on the far right side, where he stands looking directly out at us for the life of this painting. He’s the chap wearing a dark hat, next to the fellow in white.

The buildings that we see surrounding the figures were actually designed for Raphael by Bramante, one of the great architects of Rome largely responsible for the original design of St. Peter’s Basilica and upon which this particular painted architecture is based. Such grand, painted architecture provides a feeling of depth and perspective, framing the central figures and containing all the rest of a very busy scene. The two central figures would not be as dramatic or imposing if they were not standing in that middle space, but as it is framed, your eye is drawn immediately to them and the action then leads your eye to explore the rest of the painting.

Other lovely paintings in this room are Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, showing leaders of the church in heaven and earth, and a pretty depiction of the god Apollo with muses, poets and music in The Parnassus.

The main focus in the third and final room in the stanza is Fire in the Borgo, which shows Pope Leo IV miraculously putting out a fire raging around the Vatican by simply making the sign of the cross; it was apparently only designed by Raphael and executed by his assistants, as were the other pictures here, including the Coronation of Charlemagne.

Next attraction is the Sistine Chapel, but unfortunately you can no longer walk directly there but instead must follow a convoluted route through some mediocre rooms of modern art, leading to several nice benefits. Make the most of this detour by getting a glimpse of Renaissance paintings by Pinturicchio high on the walls of the Borgia Apartments, though they are quite small, dark and hard to see (go to Sienna’s Duomo for his masterpiece in the Piccolomini Library). Do yourself a favor and slide quickly through the rooms of modern art. The path ultimately leads to toilets and an air-conditioned coffee shop, definitely worth stopping at for refreshments before your final push, which requires about two more hours. Take advantage of this café, your last chance for a cool rest, with semi-hidden tables one level down. Sometimes we are happy to sacrifice food quality for convenience in the midst of a busy day. This rest will prepare you for two of life’s great experiences: Michelangelo’s ceiling at the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter’s Basilica.

Sistine Chapel next.