The world's smallest state holds one of its densest art collections: eighteen painting rooms, a 120-metre frescoed map corridor, papal apartments painted by Raphael, and a contemporary wing with Bacon and Matisse. Three days spent in the quieter galleries either side of the crowd.
Eighteen rooms hung in chronological order, from 12th-century gold-ground panels to Raphael's Transfiguration, Caravaggio's Deposition and Leonardo's unfinished St Jerome. Open 08:00–19:00 Mon–Sat, last entry 17:00.
Four papal apartments frescoed by Raphael and his workshop between 1508 and 1524. The School of Athens fills one wall of the Stanza della Segnatura, with Bramante, Leonardo and Michelangelo painted in as ancient philosophers.
A 120-metre corridor lined with 40 topographical frescoes of the Italian peninsula, painted 1580–1585 to the cartography of Ignazio Danti, beneath a gilded stucco vault of saints' lives cleaned between 2010 and 2016.
A Renaissance courtyard built around a four-metre bronze pinecone cast in the 1st century AD for a Roman fountain, now facing Arnaldo Pomodoro's cracked bronze globe Sfera con Sfera, installed here in 1990.
Founded by Gregory XVI in 1837, twenty-two rooms of material from southern Etruria: the gold fibula and bronze funerary bed from the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Cerveteri, and the 5th-century-BC bronze Mars of Todi.
Raffaele Stern's neoclassical hall of 1822 holds the Augustus of Prima Porta, excavated from Livia's villa in 1863, and a colossal reclining Nile surrounded by sixteen putti marking the river's flood cubits.
Paul VI opened this collection in 1973 across rooms of the Borgia Apartment, under Pinturicchio's frescoes of the 1490s: studies by Francis Bacon, Matisse's designs for the Vence chasubles, plus Van Gogh, Dalí and Fontana.
Rome's 1950 concert hall at Via della Conciliazione 4, seating around 1,700, hosting Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta seasons, contemporary dance and the sacred-music programme that fills the Borgo each November.
Twenty-three hectares behind St Peter's, entered only on a booked guided walk or open-bus circuit: Pirro Ligorio's Casina Pio IV of 1561, now the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a replica of the Lourdes grotto.
A pedestrian lane through the medieval Borgo, regularised under Pius IV in 1565: clerical tailors and religious-goods shops, trattorias filled at lunchtime by Vatican staff, and the marble drinking fountain at Vicolo del Farinone.
Hadrian's mausoleum of AD 139, rebuilt as the papal fortress and linked to the Vatican by the Passetto di Borgo, an 800-metre walled corridor used by Clement VII to escape the Sack of Rome in 1527.
The parish church of Vatican City, built to Vignola's oval plan from 1565 and finished by his son Giacinto, standing just inside the Porta Sant'Anna gate that Vatican residents and employees use daily.