Vatican City tickets

[Bearpawk]

Hello
Does anybody know if the skip the line tickets/ tours for Sistine/ museums/ St Peter's etc are worth it ?
Coming up pretty pricey but I also don't fancy spending 2 hours queueing for each attraction...,
All advice gratefully recieved

tickets.museivaticani.va/home buy them direct from the vatican, but definitely don't miss the opportunity to see the inside of the Vatican.

Yes. The queues at some times of the year are hours long.

Also there is a ticket for the Vatican which allows you early entry and breakfast. The food isn't very good but it is quite an experience to be eating bacon and eggs in the Vatican next to a flock of nuns and a very important priest (people kept bowing to him!)

Honestly if you spend money on one thing it should be this. I’ve just come back and the queue was monumental even though this is technically the start of the low season. If you go in summer you’ll be queuing for two hours in the scorching sun.

We got tickets for the first guided tour in the morning (8:30?) from the official site posted above. I hadn't originally wanted a guided tour but it meant we got in before people on self guided tickets could enter. That meant it was relatively empty and we could see everything properly. When we got to the Sistine Chapel there were only a few people there and a priest came in to lead prayers. It was a very peaceful, close to spiritual experience.

At the end of the tour we thought we'd go back round and see some of the galleries we'd missed and soon abandoned that idea. It was almost impossible to physically move down the main gallieries let alone see anything.

If you want to see the Sistine chapel and the Vatican museums I would definitely get tickets that let you in first thing from the official site.

Oh and at that time in the morning we literally just walked in because although the queue was forming they weren't yet letting anyone without the early tickets in.

@Mia85 when we went there was a Friday evening tour. Same sort of principle as the galleries were not packed when we went through, don't know if that exists any more though.

Definitely, we booked through the official site.

We recently got back from Rome (October) and the only thing we booked was the colosseum. We stumbled upon the Vatican museums (Sistine chapel) and walked up and got tickets for 17 euros each, this was at about 4pm. Literally no queue. It was busy inside but then you kind of get sucked along like a school of fish no matter what and there's not much you can do about it as it's quite small, very old buildings and huge group tours.

Would have liked to do St Peter's and should have bought tickets for this! The queue was flipping insane! Recommend queue skip for colosseum 100%

We joined the lengthy queue but were approached by a tour to do a guided tour.

I’m normally sceptical about this sort of thing, but we agreed, paid the £30 or so and then got fast tracked as part of a small group.

It was the best thing ever. We’d have been queuing for hours and then wandering through the MILES of museums, completely clueless. Our art historian guide stuck to the good bits, completely and utterly educated us in the museums, Sistine chapel and the basilica. It was just fantastic. So much so, I returned home slightly obsessed with Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio and Da Vinci and read about them for months afterwards.

It is worth booking absolutely everything in Rome in advance as the queues can be huge. It took me ages to plan everything but we were so happy each time we walked past yet another massive queue.

However make sure you are booking with the official sites as there are loads of scammers/resellers.

It is absolutely fine going round the Vatican with a map and not a tour.

If you have money to spend and are really keen you can get tours that skip the line first thing in the morning, walk you straight to the Sistine Chapel and you get to experience it more or less on your own - until everyone else arrives.

If money is absolutely no object then you want a private after hours tour. This would be my dream option but it stayed a dream.

Definitely do this. The queues are ridiculously long.

I went to Rome in the early 90s and just swanned into the Basilica, like any other church.

I went with DH a few years ago, and was absolutely amazed at the queues.

Its a lovely city, but full of tourists.

Thank you everyone.
We are in Rome now for a few days - faffed about on various websites and still haven't booked tickets. All sold out on the official Vatican site for the week :(
Might risk without a ticket as it doesn't seem too busy here this week

@Cora24601
May I ask where you booked tour colosseum tickets please

www.coopculture.it/en/city/rome/

So by the time we came to booking the ones in the colosseum were all sold out, we ended up booking through booking.com. We paid more than if we had got them on the main site but we were too late so we paid the price! Worth mentioning you also get entrance to a couple other sites near which are quite nice.

If you haven't booked Colosseum tickets then then I'd suggest going to the Forum on the day - which is massive and really interesting but doesn't get the queues.

You can get a combined ticket so come out of the Forum at the Colosseum end and you jump the queue into the Colosseum.

Update -
We booked online with a company who came up on the 'tickets' option for Vatican museums/ Sistine on Google maps. Skip the queue option. Tickets on the Vatican website were sold out the week before for all days.
Annoyingly when we got there; (11am, week day, November) there was literally no queue so we could have paid way less.

Re colloseum, even though the ticket sellers were hassling everyone in the way in saying there were 'no tickets left' so we had to buy through them (and they were sold out online) we happily queued at the ticket desk across the green for around 20 mins and then got straight in at the base prices.

We unfortunately ran out of time to see the forum but it's on the list to come back as we had such a good time.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to reply. My advice to anyone visiting would be if you don't want a queue on the day, to book via the official websites WELL in advance - and bring ID with you to the attractions!