Inside the Vatican Museum, the Braccio Nuovo wing

Chapter 17—Vatican Museum

The Vatican Museums and Galleries

In 1506, the popes began collecting antiquities, placing them on public display, which eventually would become the beginnings of the Vatican Museums.

The museums are part of Vatican City, adjacent to St. Peter's Basilica, in fact, the end of the tour is the Sistine Chapel which exits exit through the Basilica.

We were there in June. Bad timing. So was everybody else.

Crowded is not the word. Jammed comes close.

We had our tickets well in advance, purchasing them on the internet before leaving home, then also arranging for a tour guide, in advance too over the internet.

Our tour guide was a young lady who held an enormous amount of information in her memory banks on the details of just about every item in the galleries. We had a tour group of about 15, and we all were given a headset before entering the museum. Our guide had a headset too, but she also had a microphone with which to communicate with us.

Good thing. The crowds were so enormous and so noisy, that if she were to speak normally without the headphones, she could not have been heard.

The museums are guided along two long halls with gallery designated rooms. Some of the rooms are former apartments of former popes, elaborately decorated from floor to over the ceilings.

We were there in 2011, and it was also a year of record attendance, more than 5 million. It seemed like they all showed up on the same afternoon we were there.

The museums were housed in the Borgia Apartments until 1932, when new buildings were opened, some hallways a mile long in distance from the beginning to the Sistine Chapel at the end.

This is the museum of an immense collections of artifacts, sculptures, frescoes, paintings all from centuries of gathering by the Roman Catholic Church.

Among the thousands of items on display, here you will find Caravaggio's Entombment, Leonardo's St. Jerome in the wilderness, Perugino's Madonna and Child with Saints and San Francesco al Prato Resurrection, Giotto's Stefaneschi Triptch and Raphael's Madonna Of Foligno and Transfiguration.

Then there are designated galleries: Greek Cross Gallery, Gallery of Statues, Gallery of Busts, Gallery of Masks, Gallery of statues of animals, the Chiaramonti with statues and friezes and sarcophagus and the Museo Gregorian Etrusco -- eight galleries of Etruscan pieces from archaeological excavations.

There's the Raphael Room of frescoes. The most famous includes the Disputation of the Most Holy Sacrament or, Triumph of Religion of Famous Religious Personages. In this fresco, if you have time to stop and look, and not get bumped by the crowds, see if you can find St Peter, Adam, St. John the Evangelist, David, St. Laurence, Judas Maccabees, St. Stephen, Moses, Abraham, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Dante Alighieri.

There's also the School of Athens with such historic personages as Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, Zoroaster, Diogenes.