St. Peter's Dome Climb and Sistine Chapel Combo Tour

Awesome Experience! Highly Recommended!

My guide, Lynette, was amazing! She is a historian and holds a Phd in historical arts. She brought us into St. Peter's Basilica and pointed out lots of details which we otherwise would miss, and gave lots of explanations during the tour. She is really passionate about her job. This tour also helped us to skip all the lines for all the activities in Vatican City. Highly recommended!

Terrible Tour Guide!

Summary - Our tour guide has a doctorate in art history. We appreciate the knowledge and passion our tour guide had for art, however, she was hard to understand and skipped over all the highlights to provide unnecessary details that the group did not find interesting. Most of our group had removed their headphones due to lack of interest. In the end, we learned nothing about the Vatican. Detail - To begin, our guide spent 45 minutes detailing the history of the Vatican before we even started lining up for the dome climb. We payed for early access in this tour, i.e. to start at 7:30 and have access to the Basilica before the public, but because she was talking for so long we were with crowds anyway. The dome climb itself was awesome! But our tour went downhill from there. Our guide spent hours talking about the Basilica in 2 spots, with no time given to look around at the chapel itself. Once she finished speaking, she would race off, with her flag not raised and most of us wondering where she went. We sped through the holy doors and past the Pope Sarcophagi because she spent so long detailing the history of the art. We eventually headed to the Vatican museums with just over 1 hour left out of our 5 hour tour and we still hadn’t seen the Sistine chapel! Our guide was an art history major and so focused on the art of the museum instead of the highlights and most popular elements. They had secret papal documents especially on display for the Jubilee but instead we spent the next hour looking at a replica of the statue we just saw and diagrams of the Sistine chapel roof out in the sun. By hour 5 our feet were aching and we still hadn’t seen the Sistine chapel. We raised this with the guide several times but she ignored our concern and had no regard for our next booked tours. Instead our guide took us through 21 rooms of the museum before stopping us in the tapestry room to explain more about the art. Our tour at this point was 1 hour past the finish time and we were told if we left early we would not be able to see the Sistine chapel as we needed a guide (which we later found out was not true). By hour 6 she finally let us see the chapel but by that point we were so exhausted and running late that we just quickly walked through. Although our tour guide was knowledgeable, she gave us a tour of her interests and not the highlights that tourists would want to see. The majority of our group had even taken their headsets off because she spoke the ENTIRE 6 hours so it was a major information overload and completely ruined our experience. We left exhausted and learned nothing about the Vatican. Note - We do not remember our tour guides name but we believe it started with L and she mentioned she was from Umbria.

St. Peter's Dome Climb and Sistine Chapel Combo Tour

I highly recommend this tour. Jon was such a knowledgeable and entertaining tour guide. I learned a lot. Doing the dome climb first thing in the morning was perfect to beat the crowds. Due to the recent events of the passing of Pope Francis and the conclave, we weren’t able to visit the Sistine Chapel but that just gives me another chance to visit another time.