Vatican Museums
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The Vatican Museums are one of the biggest collections of art in the world, because they exhibit the enormous collection of works of painting and sculpture, and many other works of the human talent, accumulated in the centuries by the Popes.
The museum has been founded by the Pope Julius II in 1506; since that year every form of art of property of the Holy See is shown in this place: the Vatican Museums have a plural name because they actually are a complex of museums and collections.
Among the Museums we remember the Pinacoteca Vaticana, a collection of paintings, dated back to the Middle Ages until the 19th century, displayed in chronological order in eighteen rooms, including works of painters like Michelangelo, Raffaello and the Beato Angelico, the Museo Egizio and the Museo Etrusco, the Collection of Modern Religious Art, with works of Carlo Carrà, Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico and other museums, that keep every kind of archaeological and ethnological objects.
The tour of the Vatican Museums includes also some parts of the Palazzi Vaticani and the Sistine Chapel. Known all over the world for being the place in which the conclave is set, and because it has been decorated by Michelangelo Buonarroti, who, charged to paint the ceiling by Pope Julius II in 1508, created one of the masterpieces of italian art, with representations of Biblical scenes, among which the most famous Creation of Adam. Michelangelo painted also the Last Judgement over the altar, between 1535 and 1541: the huge work is dominated by Christ who, surrounded by his mother and all the Saints, with a simple movement of the arm decides the destiny of the men.
Among the parts of the Palazzi Vaticani open to the public, we remember the splendid Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael's rooms), frescoed by the painter from Urbino between 1508 and 1524.
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