Let me take you to Vatican, its famous St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums. This video I made will tell you about my trip to the Vatican City State, which is one of the smallest countries on Earth. The video has subtitles, which you can put on, if you want.

Trip to Vatican

The Vatican City State is located in Rome, Italy, and it has an area of just 0.44 square miles (1.2 km2) with a population of around 800 people.

Inside Vatican you will find the famous St. Peter’s Basilica. Lots of tourists come there, so you need to buy a ticket to get inside the Basilica. Plenty of pillars with lots of statues on top of them surround the St. Peter’s Square as you can see in the video.

Inside the Basilica you can see lots of religious art, icons and sculpture and beautiful architecture. One of the statues is the famous Michelangelo’s Pietà, which tells about Virgin Mary holding a dead body of Jesus. From the Vatican Museums you can find a good identical copy of that same statue, which is much easier to photograph than the one inside the Basilica.

In this video you will also see the famous altar inside the Basilica, from where the live broadcast of Pope’s Mass on Christmas comes. On a normal day there are lots of tourists inside the Basilica, but the entrance to the altar is prohibited.

In the middle of the St. Peter’s Square there is a beautiful fountain. It is having fences around it, so it is of no use to fresh up on a hot summer day when temperature goes above 40 degrees, like it did during the filming of this video. Luckily the St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums are cool places even during summer heat. This is to preserve the art pieces.

The entrance to the Vatican Museums is around the corner, after a short walk. Besides all the art you can see in the museum, there is also an inner yard, where you can see green nature, trees and grass. You will see that also in this video.

Famous paintings of Raffaello Sanzio, like Madonna of Foligno, will be shown in this video. No flash light is allowed, which is a common practice in museums to protect the paintings and their colors.

There is lots and lots of ancient sculpture inside the museum and what you see on this video is just a very tiny part of it. Also plenty of amazing art on the ceilings of Vatican museum, especially the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo, which they did not allow to photograph. The ban might be for the accidental use of flashlight by tourists, who don’t understand that the flash light wears out the painting and its colors. Just like sunlight discolours your clothes.

Read more why Michelangelo’s famous frescoes have been described as one of the world’s supreme sights and why Vatican might eventually need to consider limiting the number of visitors to the Sistine Chapel, 500 years after its completion.

If you’re planning a trip to Vatican, it is worth reserving the whole day for that trip, because there is so much to see and so many other tourists as well.

Exploring the Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums are home to some of the world’s greatest art collections and the museums contain tens of thousands of pieces of artwork, including paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Dali, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Botticelli and others.

The museums were founded in the early 16th century by the Pope and they are located in the Borgo district of Rome, Italy, and Borgo is considered one of the most beautiful areas of Rome. Today the museums are open to the public and visitors can see there the earlier mentioned Sistine Chapel, which contains the ceiling painted by Michelangelo, and the Hall of Tapestries, which features tapestries from the Middle Ages, among others.

The many galleries and exhibits throughout the museum include the Pinacoteca (picture gallery) and the Gregorian Egyptian Museum, just to mention a few.

The Museums are open daily from 9 am to 6 pm with final entry at 4 pm. Every last Sunday of the month there is a free entry, as in 2022. For more information and tickets visit the Vatican Museums official website.

You might also be interested in the official website of Vatican State.

Check also a beautiful video about the Vatican Gardens.

Find videos about the formalities of visiting Vatican Museums here

and lots of videos about the Vatican Museum collections here.

The video you can see on my site is part of my visual travel guide INDIVUE – Trip to Europe – check it also out for more travel inspiration!