Vatican Museums Small Group Tour with St. Peter's Basilica Access

Beyond Exceptional! Our tour guide was one of the friendliest we had during our vacation, and she was more than knowledgeable about this mini country! While Vatican City is overwhelming in history, sights and information, our guide gave us the right amount of everything to make our tour enjoyable. The only glitch (not the fault of our tour guide) was when a tour guide directly in front of us rudely monopolized interpretive information panels in the pinecone garden for more than 10 minutes per panel. This is important because most tours are given tome slots. Our guide politely attempted to move that group along, but to no avail. After copious apologies to us for something that was out of her control (God bless her...we all understood), we had to move on, but not before she reported it to one of the guards (he made a beeline to that tour group). I truly cannot say enough about this wonderful guide, and I hope that any reader will be lucky enough to get her as a guide!

Rushed through, many other tour groups were getting more explanations and time on things Mikaela didn’t even stop and explain. She was difficult to understand and the whisper mic and headphone system made her more difficult to understand. If the company’s name is in English I had a false impression that maybe our guide would have a better mastery of English. I do feel like her knowledge was about average but of all the guided tours we did, including the Borghese, the Ufizzi, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, this was our most expensive and our least valuable. I also understood that we would have a guide in St Peter’s Basilica and she gave us a little bit of information about the Basilica and then left us to explore it for ourselves while she left. I did appreciate that she got us into the Vatican pretty quickly. I was also surprised to learn that the day before the tour happened we were move to an half hour earlier time slot. Our guide showed up a few minutes late.

Francesca was a kind, knowledgeable, thorough, and experienced guide, chock full of information about all things Vatican. She was a pleasure to listen to and was happy to answer questions. She expertly navigated our small group of 6 through the oppressive hoards of large groups and tedious selfie-takers. The crowds were the only downside but not at all the “fault” of anyone, just the nature of the location and season. Small groups are definitely the way to go because you really can move along easier and it’s easier to hear and see your guide and the artwork or feature that they’re talking about. It’s a great tour that begins with the Vatican museum, then the Sistene Chapel, then St Peter’s Basilica and Square.

The tour was absolutely excellent! Our tour guide, Francesca actually made it all the more better. She was very knowledgeable and knew a lot about the history of Rome and the Vatican. She is one of the best tour guys we’ve ever been with. Would highly recommend this tour and especially with Francesca. I have not met anyone that has a passion for providing tours with history and information as we did with her.

We loved our guide; only negative about the tour was the guide told us that her tour company instructed her not to come into the St. Peter’s basilica with us, So she told us about the basilica outside before we went in. Which I thought was odd because there were plenty of tour guides inside with their groups. The description of the tour said a one hour guided tour in the basilica and that’s not what we got. Other than that, I think the Vatican needs to change the rules on capacity of people because it was way too many people being herded like cattle through the place and it was harder to enjoy and insanely hot.

Our guide was very knowledgeable and gave great background information. One thing to note, if you want to stay in the Museums to explore without the guide after you are done with the tour, you can, however then you would need to go into the public access line at St. Peter's Basilica (whereas the guide gets you in a separate line for St. Peter). We wish we would have had more time to explore the museums and did not realize (at the time of booking, our guide did clarify this for us) transitioning over to St. Peter's means you can't come back to the museum. We would have booked two separate tours in hindsight.