I’ve just spent the last few hours here and apart from the other million tourists it was ok.  I queued for a ticket and I waited for about 1 hour and had to listen to two girls talking about where they had been and how much they drank, but it saved me using the phone to keep me amused.

There were two queues to join when you arrive and of course one is if you have already bought a ticket and so you can go to the front of the queue,  but there were also the other people,  the tour group people. These were the ones that I disliked on my visit here. They are very annoying creatures indeed. From the first moment when they cast an eye towards us there is a definite smugness in the air and then they jump the queue and there gone. But that is really their only victory here because they have to follow a tour guide and listen to them dribble on for two hours before they can escape which I would call purgatory. The strange thing was that there was not a sense of smugness from the ones that had pre booked tickets. 

Anyway the tour groups, move through the corridors enmasse and block the place just like a big fat burger does in the sewers. 

Mind you if you can just keep in between these blockages then you can use it to your advantage and then this is where the smugness changes sides. Now we can be smug and we can stay a little longer to linger and as they get dragged away by the guide into another chamber.

Sometimes you will then have that area to yourself to enjoy and there are also rooms that the tour guide will not take them and so you have the freedom to move around and they do not. 

Having a tour guide of course can be a good thing but I have come here to look and to appreciate the wonders of the history that lies here and I want to do it at my own pace. I can also get an audio guide if need be. But sometimes I do listen in if I hear them mention something of interest, I steal a little nugget of information.

The Vatican Museum is amazing and you could spend days in here.  There are so many interesting pieces and it just goes to show you that many of the early civilisations that have come and gone have also been very clever and technically advanced. I enjoyed the Egyptian and the Roman galleries the most. 

But there was another gallery full of stone tablets convered with incredible intricate script and as you look at them you ask yourself” How the hell could they inscribe this, what did they use? ” the writing is very small, neat and straighter than most of my writing. The scribes that wrote these were very skilled indeed and yet do we know how they did it? We can hazard a guess but I’m not sure there are too many people that could produce such work today and in a time frame that would be acceptable.
But there is so much to see and so much to say but I think that if you have the opportunity to see it for yourself then you should go. 

As you get nearer to the end of your tour here you will be guided down long corridors filled with statues and tapestries and paintings. 

There is even one with huge maps. But beyond this,the galleries themselves are impressive and in some cases more impressive than the art they contain.

This is the final part of the museum that we can see and of course the visit here culminates with entering the Sistine Chapel. No selfie sticks here or cameras. There is a lot of security here to prevent such things and you know it’s actually refreshing to see people absorbed in the art and not themselves.

I sat for a while along with everyone else looking at this space but to be honest I was more impressed with some of the galleries that we had come through to reach this sacred place.  It is spectacular but for me I also like the architecture of a building and so I felt a little let down by this space.  On saying that it’s also possible that I’m getting a little bit jaded to the religious art that is everywhere in Italy. Even although the best man in the business worked here and his work is flawless I still left here thinking it was just another interesting religious space.

If you had made it this far with your tour group then you could use the secret passage as you were promised to go straight to Saint Peters Basilica, I of course had to exit the museum and take the long way round which gave me the chance for lunch before moving on.