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Last Minute Advice Needed: Tickets vs Tour at the Vatican Museums

Posted by on

Hi all!

My wife and I are taking a 15 year anniversary trip to Rome & Florence. We'll be in Rome the first few days of May. We are looking at booking Vatican Museum tickets and are down to a couple of options. I'd like to hear the hive-mind's advice on these two ideas:

(a) Book admission for the last entry time (5:30pm) on Friday. Cost: €50. I believe the museums close at 8:00, so this will at least give us a couple of hours.

(b) Book a tour in German for earlier in the day (12:30pm). Cost: €80 Here's the key: we don't speak German. But for an extra $30, we'd get in earlier and could hang around longer. Would we need to stay with the group? If not, we could just break off once in the museum.

Any advice is appreciated!

Posted by
28249 posts

You wouldn't need to stay with the group as long as it isn't going to normally-closed-off parts of the museums, which I assume it does not. You could get an English-language audio guide if you wanted to. I found I was fine just reading the posted information, but the Museum weren't quite as crowded in March 2023 as the will undoubtedly be in May 2024.

The Museums are really large, so if you are seriously interested in the art (or the religious aspect of things), I think paying a bit more to have extra time would be worth it.

Although the museums nominally close at 8 PM, you can be sure the staff will start ushering people back toward the entrance considerably before that. It happens in large museums all over Europe. It could begin shortly after 7:30, because it takes quite a long time to walk back through the museums to the exit.

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