Welcome to our Tour Of Italy April 2007- Vatican Museums

Vatican Museums is one of the most important Museum in the world housing very important masterpieces from Egyptian Age to late Renaissance.

The museums are composed of several sections:
The Gregorian Etruscan Museum
was founded by Pope Gregory XVI in 1837 and mostly contains objects that starting from 1828 were found in the excavations of the ancient cities of southern Etruria , then part of the Pontifical State.

The Pinacoteca
was inaugurated on 27 October 1932 in the building especially constructed by the architect Luca Beltrami for Pope Pius XI.

The Missionary-Ethnological Museum
was founded on November 12, 1926 by Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) . It was established in the Lateran Apostolic Palace up to 1963, when the Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) had it transferred to the Vatican. It was opened to the public in 1973.

The Raphael Stanze
("Raphael's rooms") in the Palace of the Vatican form a suite of reception rooms, the public part of the papal apartments. They are famous for their frescos painted by Raphael and his workshop.

The Sistine Chapel
is a chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope, in the Vatican City. Its fame rests on its architecture, which evokes Solomon's Temple of the Old Testament, its decoration, frescoed throughout by the greatest Renaissance artists, including Michaelangelo whose ceiling is legendary, and its purpose, as a site of papal religious and functionary activity, notably the conclave at which a new Pope is selected.

Finally after a half hour queue, we entered the entrance of the Vatican Museums. We passed through the large crowd, entered the Gregorian Museum, then the Raphael Stanze and up to the Sistine chapel. The sculptures and painting were incredible particularly those by Raphael and Michaelangelo. Walls and ceiling were filled with frescoes such as the Creation of Life and the Last Judgment. Words cannot describe the beauty of the Renaissance Arts. Only photos taken were able to capture a small percentage of what we saw with our naked eyes.