After our visit to St. Peter's, we walked around to the back entrance of Vatican City to get in line for the Musei Vaticani, which despite housing tens of thousands of sculptures, paintings, and tapestries, really seemed to be all about the Sistine Chapel. The museum is designed in a way that you walk through room after room, each packed with artwork until you reach the final destination - Michaelangeo's masterpiece. I'd estimate the procession of people through the museum was thousands in number, again, with the procession having a very impressive length to time ratio. At points though, it bottlenecked and got very hot and stuffy. We couldn't help but be annoyed by all the close body contact, made worse by the fact that there were obviously varying levels of hygenic responsibility in the crowd.
The Sistine Chapel is much smaller than I expected it to be. I'll have to verify this later, but I'd guess it to be not much more than 1000 square feet. It was packed wall to wall with people, a lucky few being able to sit on a bench that ran the perimeter of the room. There were a few guards shushing people and yelling "No Videos!" and "No Photos!" repeatedly. Their authority was ignored by many, who simply turned their flashes off and snapped anyway. A few spats started between the picture-takers and the non picture-takers, who took it upon themselves to enforce the seemingly soft rule. It was bizarre, uncomfortable, and completely not what I expected of such a sacred place.
That said, my travel companion and I managed to smuggle a few shots for ourselves.
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