The Gallery of Maps, 120 metres of hand-painted Italy

The Gallery of Maps is the most photographed room in the Vatican Museums and, oddly, the one people look at least. Almost everyone crosses it with a phone pointed at the gilded vault, carried along by the crowd heading for Raphael, and leaves without having read a single map. I think that’s a shame, because it’s a rare spot in the museums where you don’t need to know anything about art to enjoy yourself. Knowing roughly where Venice is will do. Here’s what it is, how it’s laid out and what I’d look for. To see where it fits in the bigger picture, here’s my three-hour route through the Vatican Museums.

A pope who wanted Italy on one wall

Gregory XIII wanted a corridor close to the Sistine Chapel where Italy would be painted to scale, region by region, together with the Church’s own territories. Ottaviano Nonni, known as Mascherino, put it up between 1578 and 1580, and the museums’ history page dates the gallery’s birth to 1581. The scheme came from the Dominican friar Egnazio Danti, who was a cosmographer, astronomer and mathematician all at once, and a large team of painters under Girolamo Muziano and Cesare Nebbia finished it in less than two years.

The detail I like best on the official page is a different one. At a time when Italy was a jigsaw of republics, duchies, kingdoms and Papal States, this gallery painted it for the first time as a single geographical, historical, religious and cultural unit. The dedication calls the peninsula «nobilissima», the noblest of all.

How do you read the maps?

This is where most visitors go wrong, because they walk in expecting one big map and find forty small ones. The trick is the order. Enter from the southern end and the 32 regional maps run north to south, notionally divided by the Apennines. The wall facing the Belvedere Courtyard carries the regions washed by the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian seas, and the wall facing the Gardens carries those bounded by the Alps and the Adriatic. In other words, walking the corridor is like travelling down the boot.

The remaining eight are narrower and sit at the ends. Beside the current entrance you’ll find the Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto, flanked by Elba and the Tremiti islands. On the opposite wall are the four great ports of the day, Civitavecchia, Genoa, Venice and Ancona. If you’ve only got five minutes, I’d head for these, because they’re the city views people recognise most easily.

Danti didn’t stop at geography. He added inscriptions to each map, plans of the main cities and scenes from ancient and modern history. The official page gives two examples that make a good game of spot-the-battle, the Metaurus, where Roman troops defeated the Carthaginians in 207 BC, and Julius II’s siege of Mirandola in 1511.

Save the ceiling for last

The vault holds 51 panels in gilded stucco frames, interspersed with Old Testament scenes, biblical figures and allegories of the virtues. Each panel tells an episode from church history, or from the life of a saint, tied to the region painted directly below, so ceiling and wall are telling the same story. Every painted surface in the gallery was restored between September 2012 and April 2016.

My advice is to look up at the end. Start with the ceiling and you’ll do what everyone does, leaving with the photo and none of the story. Read two or three maps first and the vault suddenly makes sense.

Where it falls on the route, and how long to give it

On the official map the gallery is number 8. You reach it after the Gallery of the Candelabra, which the museums group with the Pio Clementino Museum and the Laocoön, and the Gallery of Tapestries. After it come the Room of the Immaculate Conception, the Raphael Rooms and then the Sistine. That position matters, because it’s a bottleneck almost every visitor passes through at the same time.

I’d give it a quarter of an hour. That’s what 120 metres takes at an easy pace, with stops at the ports, a hunt for one battle and a last look upwards. Book the first morning slot and you’ll get here before the corridor fills. If you’ve come from the Vatican Pinacoteca, as the official tours do, expect to have been inside for about an hour already.

Photos, tickets and what I’d avoid

The gallery has no ticket of its own. You see it on the standard Museums ticket, which covers the Sistine too, and on the final Sunday of each month the museums open free of charge from 09:00 to 14:00. Personal photos are allowed, always without flash, tripod or selfie stick. My shot would be from one end, with the corridor vanishing into the distance and the vault closing the frame.

What I wouldn’t do is pay a premium for a Gallery of Maps «experience» on a resale site, because nothing of the sort exists at the official ticket office. The real options, with their prices, are compared on the Vatican tickets page.