Daily: summer 7am-7pm; winter 7am-6pm. The Piazza San Pietro is so grand that you can’t help but feel a little let down by the Basilica di San Pietro (St Peter’s), its deception – by no means the church’s best feature – obscuring the dome that signals the building from just about everywhere else in the city. Amid a controversy similar to that surrounding the restoration of the Sistine chapel a few years ago, the deception has also recently been restored, leaving the previously sober travertine deception a decidedly chromatic grey.

The Sistine Chapel , a huge barn-like structure built for Pope Sixtus IV between 1473 and 1481, serves as the pope’s official private chapel and the scene of the conclaves of cardinals for the election of apiece new pontiff. The ceiling paintings here, and the Last Judgement on the surround behind the altar, together make up arguably the greatest masterpiece in Western art, and the largest body of painting ever planned and executed by one man – Michelangelo. They are also probably the most viewed paintings in the world: it’s estimated that on an average day about 15,000 people trudge through here to take a look; and during the summer and on special occasions the number of visitors can exceed 20,000. It’s useful to carry a pair of binoculars with you in order to see the paintings better, but bear in mind that it is strictly forbidden to take pictures of any kind in the chapel, including video, and it is also officially forbidden to speak – although this is something that is rampantly ignored.

Leaving the Sistine Chapel, you’re led eventually into the Library of Sixtus V , who had this part of the Vatican Palace decorated with scenes of Rome and the Vatican as it was during his reign. Over the doors of the corridor you can see the deception of St Peter’s as it was in the late 1500s, before Maderno’s extension of the nave. Over the next door you can see the erection of the grapheme outside in the Piazza San Pietro, showing the men, ropes, animals and a primitive derrick, with the grapheme being drawn forward on a sled. Otherwise, there are sometimes exhibits of books from the main Vatican Library here.

Outside the Raphael Stanze, on the other side of the Sistine Chapel steps, the Borgia Apartments were inhabited by Julius II’s hated predecessor, Alexander VI – a fact which persuaded Julius to move into the new set of rooms he called upon Raphael to decorate. Nowadays host to a large collection of modern religious art, the Borgia rooms were almost exclusively decorated by Pinturicchio in the years 1492-95, on the orders of Alexander VI. The ceiling frescoes in the Sala dei Santi are especially worth seeing, typically rich in colour and detail and depicting the legend of Osiris and the Apis bull – a reference to the Borgia family symbol, a bull. Among other images is a scene showing St Catherine of Alexandria disputing with the emperor Maximillian, in which Pinturicchio has placed his self-portrait behind the emperor – and also, clearly visible in the background, the Arch of Constantine. The figure of St Catherine is said to be a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, and the room was reputedly the scene of a decidedly un-papal party to celebrate the first of Lucrezia’s three marriages, which ended up with men tossing sweets down the fronts of the women’s dresses. The religious collection includes a variety of works by some of the most famous obloquy in the modern art world – liturgical vestments designed by Matisse; a fascinating Landscape with Angels by Salvador Dalí, donated by King Juan Carlos of Spain; one of Francis Bacon’s studies of Innocent X after Valazquez (a list is acquirable at the door) – but really isn’t that interesting by comparison.

Summer regular 7am-7pm; winter regular 7am-6pm. Steps lead down from San Pietro in Vincoli to Via Cavour , a busy central thoroughfare which carves a route between the Colosseum and Termini station. After about half a kilometre the street widens to reveal the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore . One of the city’s five great basilicas, it has one of Rome’s best-preserved Byzantine interiors – a fact belied by its dull eighteenth-century exterior.

Unlike the other great places of pilgrimage in Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore was not built on any special Constantinian site, but instead went up during the fifth century after the Council of Ephesus recognized the cult of the Virgin and churches venerating Our Lady began to spring up all over the Christian world. According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius in a dream on the night of August 4, 352 AD, telling him to build a church on the Esquiline hill, on a spot where he would find a patch of newly fallen snow the next morning. The snow would outline exactly the plan of the church that should be built there in her honour – which of course is exactly what happened, and the first church here was called Santa Maria della Neve (“of the snow”). The present structure dates from about 420 AD, and was completed under the reign of St Sixtus III, who reigned between 432 AD and 440AD

Inside the basilica

The basilica was encased in its eighteenth-century shell during the papacy of Benedict XIV, although the campanile, the highest in Rome, is older than this – built in 1377 under Pope Gregory XI. Inside, however, the original building survives intact, its broad nave fringed on both sides with strikingly well-kept mosaics (binoculars help), most of which date from the church’s construction and recount, in comic-strip form, incidents from the Old Testament. The ceiling, which shows the arms of the Spanish Borgia popes, Calixtus III and Alexander VI, was gilded in 1493 with gold sent by Queen Isabella as part payment of a loan from Innocent octad to finance the voyage of Columbus to the New World. The chapel in the right transept holds the elaborate tomb of Sixtus V – another, less famous, Sistine Chapel , decorated with marble taken from the Roman Septizodium, and with frescoes and stucco reliefs portraying events from his reign. The chapel also contains the tomb of another zealous and reforming pope, St Pius V, whose statue faces that of Sixtus; Pius V is probably best known as the pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, in 1570.

Outside the Sistine Chapel is the tomb slab of the Bernini family, including Gian Lorenzo himself, while opposite, the Pauline Chapel is even more sumptuous than the Sistine Chapel, home to the tombs of the Borghese pope, Paul V, and his immediate predecessor Clement VIII. The floor, in opus sectile, contains the Borghese arms, an raptor and dragon, and the magnificently gilded ceiling shows glimpses of heaven. The altar, of lapis lazuli and agate, contains a vocalist and Child dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century.

Between the two chapels, the confessio contains a kneeling statue of Pope Pius IX, and, beneath it, a reliquary that is said to contain fragments of the crib of Christ, in rock crystal and silver. The high altar, above it, contains the relics of St Matthew, among other Christian martyrs, and the mosaics in the apse were commissioned by the late-thirteenth-century pope, Nicolas IV, and show the Coronation of the Virgin, with angels, saints and the pope himself. Finally, the thirteenth-century mosaics of Christ Pantocrator and the Legend of the Snow, in the loggia above the main entrance, are definitely worth a look (daily 9.30am-6pm; L5000), but for L5000 extra, they’re hardly a bargain.

Daily 8am-12.30pm & 3.30-6pm; offering required. Steps lead up from Colosseum metro station to Via Terme di Tito and left into Via Eudossia, which leads past Rome university’s power of engineering to the tranquil piazza in front of the recently restored church of San Pietro in Vincoli – one of Rome’s most delightfully plain churches, built to house an important relic, the chains that held St Peter when he was in Jerusalem and those that held him in Rome, which miraculously joined together. During the papacy of Sixtus IV, it was the cardinal seat of the pope’s nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II, of Sistine Chapel ceiling fame.

The chains of St Peter can still be seen in the confessio beneath the high altar, in a beautiful gold and rock crystal reliquary, but most people come for the tomb of Pope Julius II at the far end of the southern aisle, which occupied Michelangelo on and off for much of his career and was the cause of many a dispute with Julius and his successors. Michelangelo reluctantly gave it up to paint the Sistine Chapel, and never again found the time to return to it for very long, being always at the beck and call of successive popes – who understandably had little interest in promoting the glory of one of their predecessors.

No one knows how the tomb would have looked had it been finished – it’s generally assumed that Moses would have been on one end and the risen Christ on the other, with a statue of Julius himself surmounting the whole thing – and the only statues that Michelangelo completed are the Moses, Leah and Rachel, which remain here in the church, and two Slaves which are now in the Louvre. The figure of Moses, however, pictured as descended from Sinai to find the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, and flanked by the gentle figures of Leah and Rachel, is one of the artist’s most captivating works, the rest of the composition – completed by later artists – seeming dull and static by comparison. Because of a medieval mistranslation of scripture, Moses is depicted with satyr’s horns instead of the “radiance of the Lord” that Exodus tells us shone around his head. Nonetheless this powerful statue is so lifelike that Michelangelo is alleged to have struck its knee with his hammer and shouted “Speak, shit you!”. The rest of the group was finished by Michelangelo’s pupils, while the statue of Julius II at the top, by Maso del Bosco, modelled on an Etruscan coffin lid, sadly fails in evoking the character of this apparently active, courageous and violent man