Italy Travel & Hotel Guide

Outside the Etruscan Museum, the large monumental staircase leads back down to the main route, taking you first through the Gallery of Candelabra , the niches of which are adorned with huge candelabra taken from Imperial Roman villas. This room is also stuffed with ancient sculpture, its most memorable piece being a copy of the famous statue of Diana of Ephesus, whose the multiple breasts are, according to the Vatican official line, in fact bees’ eggs. Beyond here the Gallery of Tapestries has on the left Belgian tapestries to designs by the school of Raphael which show scenes from the life of Christ, and on the right tapestries prefabricated in Rome at the Barberini workshops during the 1600s, showing scenes from the life of Maffeo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII. Next, the Gallery of Maps , which is as long (175m) as the previous two galleries place together, was decorated in the late sixteenth century at the behest of Pope Gregory XIII, the reformer of the calendar, to show all of Italy, the major islands in the Mediterranean, the papal possessions in France, as well as the siege of Malta, the effort of Lepanto and large-scale maps of the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa. This room is considered by many to be the most beautiful area in the entire Vatican Museums, and its ceiling frescoes, illustrating scenes that took place in the area depicted in apiece adjacent map, are perhaps one reason why.

After the Gallery of the Maps, there is a hall with more tapestries, and, to the left, the Room of the Immaculate Conception , which sports nineteenth-century frescoes of Pope Pius IX declaring the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on December 8, 1854. From here all visitors are directed to a covered path suspended over the palace courtyard of the Belvedere which leads through to the Raphael Stanze.

Category: Vatican Museums