The Vatican Museums

One of the highlights of the trip was the 6am tour of the Vatican museums (yes Thérèse did get out of bed early enough for a 6am tour!). They call it the “Master Key” tour, with the conceit being your lead around the museums by a guide plus the “key master” who is opening up all the doors of the museum for the day. Everyone on the tour gets to open a door and/or turn on lights.

Whilst there are some other early morning tours, they all start a fair while after our tour and we didn’t see any tourists other than our group until the very end of our tour.

Being honest, we weren’t there to open doors - we wanted the opportunity to see it empty rather than packed and to get photos of the museum with no one there. That definitely happened - when we left at 08.30, the queue at the front door was at least 500m long and 3 or 4 people deep! We were glad not to join that scrum!

Roof of the Map Room

Sistine Chapel

Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Sistine chapel