Equally impressive is huge collection of art work housed and displayed in the Vatican Museums next to St Peters. Museums (plural) because seeing all of the vast collection of various types of art in the lengthy multi-story museum can entail walking as much as 7 miles. The obvious draw for most people is the Sistine Chapel, but the museum has a rather rigid traffic flow pattern forcing people to take in at least some (not necessarily all) of the collections before ending in the Sistine Chapel. Unlike most museums that have valuable paintings, photography is allowed everywhere except in the Sistine Chapel. There the guards vigorously enforce the ban. This is because all photography rights in the Sistine Chapel belong not to the Vatican, but rather to a Japanese company that paid somewhere between $3 and $4 million dollars for the massive restoration of the artwork in the Chapel. Needless to say, Michelangelo's ceiling is as spectacular as its reputation. Although we did not walk all 7 miles of the gallery, we did manage to see about 75% of it. Among the most interesting sections were the Pio-Clementine collection of Greek statues, the Gallery of Maps, the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel.
One other thing, the second best decision of the trip was ordering the tickets online before the trip. Instead of waiting in a line several blocks long to buy tickets at the door, we bypassed a couple of hundred folks, getting right in.
