Rome: Private tour of the Sistine Chapel
Many people visit the Sistine Chapel in the hope of experiencing a sublime or spiritual moment, but more often than not it ends up being a long, soul-destroying process. If you pass by the entrance to the Vatican City, which sees up to 17,000 visitors a day, there is an endless line of tourists waiting to enter. And once you're inside, how in God's name is it possible to be inspired with a guard shouting: "no pictures, no pictures"?
The solution? Take an exclusive tour carried out before or after opening hours.
The Sistine Chapel is officially closed at night. Private tours are usually reserved for royals, politicians, and celebrities, but in 2007 these tours began for the public. These "after hours" tours were set up by Helen Donegan, an Irish woman who has lived in Italy for 35 years and realised the business potential after trying to get a disabled friend into the chapel after closing time. Groups can consist of up to 20 people, with one guide for every 10, and tours last up to two hours. At €275pp (£232) they are considerably more expensive than the normal admission price of €15pp, but this is bound to be the highlight of any trip: a front-row, private viewing of one of the world's great works of art.
Our tour began at 8am, two hours before opening time, and we were lucky that there were just two of us plus the guide. We skipped the queues that had already started to form outside and entered a mysteriously quiet Vatican City. I have often been sceptical of tour guides, preferring to do my own homework. With the Vatican Museums and its overwhelming 1,400 rooms, however, it would be foolish not to have a guided tour. Our guide was an enthusiastic, knowledgeable Italian painter who illuminated the works we saw. She led us through the 120 metre-long map room, past the huge tapestries by Pieter van Aelst, and the Raphael rooms that include a painting of the all-star line up of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael himself in the School of Athens.
Unexpectedly, with nobody in front of us, we took a sharp turn and made our way through a small unassuming door. We emerged inside the chapel – just us (a handful of tour groups) and Michelangelo. Michelangelo spent four and a half years painting the chapel by himself, and this is the closest one can get to being alone in it as he was. There are no guards asking you to be quiet, no banging into other tourists who are also looking up, and no gesturing to move on to let more people in. Just silence.
I savoured the experience: soaking up the vivid blue restoration of the Last Judgement, finding Michelangelo's frowning face in the distance, and moving at leisure from the Separation of Light from Darkness on. You could even use the chapel as it was intended: as a place for prayer.
Follow up your tour, as we did, by climbing to the top of St Peter's. Take the purgatorial 320 steps that spiral inside the dome - after spending your time looking up, here is a chance to look down: to the basilica and across the whole of Rome. You may not have reached heaven, but you have reached the highest point of the Eternal City.
Kohinoor Sahota
• 360 degree image of the Sistine Chapel
• Out of hours Vatican tours are run by Italy With Us, Via Vespasiano 16-18 (+39 06 3972 3051, italywithus.com). Cost: €275pp.
Easyjet, Jet2 and Ryanair fly to Rome from various UK airports.
Florence: Walking the Vasari corridor
For the last 20 years, every time I have visited Florence I have tried to see the Vasari Corridor, the kilometre-long elevated passage built by the Grand Duke Cosimo de'Medici between his office and his home. It runs from the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi (literally "offices") across the river Arno on top of the Ponte Vecchio, past Machiavelli's house, to end in the Palazzo Pitti.
Each time I tried, the Corridor was closed, either for restoration, because it had suffered bomb damage (a Mafia car bomb in 1993), or it had opened and then shut again a few weeks before I arrived.
Many Florentines have never even seen the Corridor – its eccentric openings and closings are a mystery in a city that still retains its Renaissance secrecy and intrigue alongside its Renaissance beauty and art.
Finally, one freezing night in December, I met Massimo, a history teacher who doubles as a city guide. Massimo manoeuvred our small group through the bedlam of the Uffizi into the only functioning lift, then up to the main picture galleries. We hurtled past glimpses of Duccio, Botticelli, Leonardo and Bronzino until we arrived at tall, anonymous wooden doors. A museum guard pulled them open and swiftly shut again behind us. In the sudden silence, we stared down a long, wide staircase into the private world of a Renaissance Grand Duke.
The Corridoio Vasariano is much grander and more spacious than the dark passageway I had imagined. Cosimo commissioned the architect, writer and painter Giorgio Vasari to build it for the wedding of Cosimo's son Francesco to Joanna of Austria in 1565. The ruler was not popular and wanted a safer route to his office than walking through the dirty city streets surrounded by body guards.
At the bottom of the stairs, we turned left and crossed high above the Lungarno traffic on to a lovely arcaded loggia beside the Arno. I always thought this loggia was to keep the souvenir hustlers dry during Florence's infamous downpours, but its main purpose is to carry the Corridor.
From here, we walked above the jewellers' shops on the Ponte Vecchio. Over the centuries, shops and Corridor have shifted so that the floor undulates and you feel as though you're walking on water, which in a way you are. The Corridor doubles as a gallery for the world's largest collection of self-portraits by artists from Rubens and Rembrandt (both stuck in unlit corners because "Florence has so many masterpieces there's nowhere to put them all") to the writer Carlo Levi and Marc Chagall, who donated his because he wanted one of his pictures to hang in the Uffizi.
But it is hard to concentrate on paintings in this "corridor with a view". The square windows look towards Santa Croce and the round ones, the "eyes of Cosimo" overlook the Arno and the crowds on the bridge below.
In 1938, preparing for Hitler's visit, Mussolini ordered three large picture windows cut in this section of the Corridor. The story goes that Hitler was so impressed with the resulting view that when the German army retreated and blew up all Florence's bridges, he intervened to spare the Ponte Vecchio (although the approaches were dynamited and badly rebuilt.)
Vasari constructed the Corridor's entire kilometre in five months – ruthlessly buying up and destroying anything that got in his way. Across the river, it kinks around the Mannelli family tower – they alone had the power to resist Vasari – before running straight through the church of Santa Felicita. Here a balcony allowed the Medici family to join the service without being observed. Unfortunately for them, they were standing on top of the church's masterpieces by Pontormo – his fabulously coloured and tragic Deposition and charming Annunciation. "Pontormo's work was seen with astonishment by all of Florence", wrote Vasari, but not by the Medici.
All too soon, we emerged from a little door into the Boboli Gardens next to the fanciful grotto by Bernardo Buontalenti, while the Corridor marched its last few metres into the Pitti Palace. It was a bit of a shock to be back in the real world; the Corridor had encased us in 16th-century exclusivity and quiet safety.
It was worth the wait and the pricey tour. (You can only visit as part of a group. Italian speakers can book cheaply through the Uffizi but all English-speaking tours are run by private companies at a premium price of around €90). At the moment, tour companies are taking bookings until October 2011, when major renovations to the Uffizi may close the Corridor again. However, the "New Uffizi's" architect Dottore Godoli now says it will not close ... it seems Florence remains shrouded in mystery.
Carolyn Lyons
• Florence and Tuscany Tours run tours in English florenceandtuscanytours.com. Context Travel will arrange a personal tour led by an art historian contexttravel.com. Tours in Italian only, €14: polomuseale.firenze.it/eventi. From 14 June to 30 October the Uffizi will celebrate Vasari's 500th birthday with an exhibition Vasari – the Uffizi and the Duke.
Flights: Meridiana flies from Gatwick to Florence. Easyjet, Jet2, Ryanair and Thomson fly to Pisa, 65km from Florence, from various UK airports.
