Vatican Museums

The Vatican's collection has a birthday: in January 1506 a marble group was dug out of a Roman vineyard, a father and his two sons writhing in the coils of sea serpents. The sculptor Michelangelo hurried over to see it, and Pope Julius II bought it within the month and put it on display. That statue, the Laocoön, is still here, and it is where these museums begin.

Five centuries of popes kept collecting, and the result is one of the largest museum complexes on earth, walked by millions each year along a single long route. You pass Greek and Roman marbles, the map-lined corridors, and the Raphael Rooms, frescoed by Raphael for Julius while Michelangelo worked nearby.

That route ends in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted its ceiling between 1508 and 1512, lying on scaffolding, the creation of Adam reaching across the vault, and returned a generation later to cover the altar wall with the Last Judgement. Photographs are forbidden and a guard asks for silence, though a few hundred people are usually standing under it at once.