Vatican City Bus Tours

Guided bus tours of the following historic sites in Vatican City Italy.

St. Peter's Basilica

Standing on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, St. Peter’s Basilica is the Catholic Church’s largest and most important building.

Completed in 1626, the construction of the basilica took about 120 years and houses first Pope St. Peter’s tomb. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, St. Peter’s Basilica is one of the most remarkable achievement of the Renaissance.

If the Pope is in the Vatican, visitors can have the chance to meet him every Wednesday mornings during the Papal Audience inside the basilica.

Vatican Museums

The Vatican Museums are the public museums of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the most renowned Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, and currently employ 640 people who work in 40 different administrative, scholarly, and restoration departments.

Pope Julius II founded the museums in the early 16th century. The Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling and altar wall decorated by Michelangelo, and the Stanze di Raffaello (decorated by Raphael) are on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums.

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vatican Museums were visited by only 1,300,000 persons, a drop of 81 percent from the number of visitors in 2019, but still enough to rank the museums fourth among the most-visited art museums in the world.

There are 24 galleries, or rooms, in total, with the Sistine Chapel, notably, being the last room visited within the Museum.

Pope Francis

Pope Francis calling for peace and unity on August 14th 2014 in his first speech in English.

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What Pope Francis said about Just War