Can you tell me if the company "MyVaticanTour.com" is legitimate. We're
going to be in Roma the last two weeks of September and are considering
buying tickets from them as they claim they can bypass waiting in the
long lines.
I emailed the Vatican a couple of weeks ago, but no answer yet.
Tim - It is my understanding that the lines at the Vatican museum have all but disappeared given new management. I was there two weeks ago and had booked a tour company for the very same reason - to avoid the lines. I was supposed to meet our tour guide at 2:00 p.m., but they did not show up. I was there at 1:30, and so I had time to watch the line to get in. During the entire 45 minutes that we waited for the tour guide, the line moved quickly and I would estimate that the wait was never longer than about 5 minutes. When it was obvious that my own tour guide wasn't going to show up (thankfully I hadn't paid anything yet), we simply got into the lineup ourselves, waited no more than 5 minutes, and went inside. We used the Rick Steves podcast, that I had downloaded onto my iPod, to guide us through. The money that we saved on the tour guide, and it would have been quite expensive, was used on a nice bottle of wine that evening for supper. Just a thought ...
Tim....
I don't think that you can e-mail the Vatican to set up a tour. According to their website, there is a fax number where you can fax a request for one of the Vatican tours. We thought about doing this also because of the long lines. We missed the museum the last time we were in Rome due to a celebration for then Pope Paul II that we were unaware of so wanted to make sure that we got in this time. However, after reading a number of posts that the lines have really shortened up and due to the fact that we were unsure of whether the Vatican's tour accessed the Pinacoteca, we have decided to do it on our own.
