Vatican Museum, Vatican City

The Vatican Museum has long rows of very old statues. It also contains the Sistine Chapel. When visiting the the Sistine Chapel, I learned from my audio tour that it was restored fairly recently. The result was so much more vibrant that scholars had to reevaluate Michelangelo's style. Though I later learned that the restoration was controversial. This vibrant effect may be misleading, as some believe that the restoration may have wiped away some layers of paint with which Michelangelo had intentionally made it less vibrant in the end. The audio tour explained where a lot of the parts of the ceiling came from, but I was also curious who painted the various popes near the ceiling, or for that matter the walls altogether (other than the Rapture painting on the front wall, which Michelangelo painted years later). Listening to the audio tour was annoying because there were so many annoying tourists bumping into me, and talking. But what was louder than the talking tourists were the officials periodically telling everybody to stop talking, as was the rule in the chapel. My tour was also interrupted by a short prayer service, which was a complete with a session of the priest in the confessional afterwards. I suppose confessing your sins in the Sistine Chapel comes with its bragging rights.