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Private Vatican Tour with Skip-the-line tickets
Duration
4 hours
Overview
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We’ll begin our visit with the Vatican Palace (now housing the Vatican Museums), one of the world's great repositories of ancient and Renaissance art. Here, we'll start with a thorough overview of papal history and the construction of the Vatican Palace.
Then, we'll traverse the halls of the museums as we head to the Sistine Chapel, where we’ll discuss Michelangelo’s work, his struggles with the medium (fresco) and his patron (the Pope), and the fantastic symbolism of the ceiling and altar. We’ll spend the final forty to sixty minutes of this tour exploring St. Peter's Basilica, a vast church and the symbolic center of Catholicism, situating the church and its artworks in a social and historical context, tying it back to the themes discussed earlier in the tour.
At the end of the tour, we will have a complete understanding of the history, importance, and artistic legacy from this expansive complex. We will learn from our guide new ways of seeing art and thinking about history.