Guided tour of Michelangelo

Tour overview

Guided tour of Michelangelo’s life and art in Rome

On this 2.5-hour walking tour, we will visit Michelangelo’s most impressive works of art and you will learn about him as a human being, a sculpture, a painter, an architect, and a poet. This guided tour will include the entire body of works that the artist made in Rome.

Let’s start with the beautiful square of Capitoline Hill, which was designed in 1536 on the order of Pope Paul III and finished much later by Michelangelo’s student Giacomo della Porta.

Next we’ll walk to the only Michelangelo statue that you can almost touch: that’s how close you can get to his Christ the Redeemer in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the only church in Rome that still has architecture from the medieval period. From there we’ll walk out into the Monti neighborhood, where you can see his spectacular Moses, which he sculpted in 1506 under Pope Julius II. This statue was originally meant as part of the Pope’s tomb, but Michelangelo never completed the original design (which included 40 statues) that Pope Julius had asked for. This was because two years later, the Pope gave Michelangelo a bigger project: painting the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museums, a job which took the artist 10 years of his life to complete. We will not visit the Vatican in this guided tour, since it would take too long.

Afterwards, we will take you to where Michelangelo got most of his inspiration: by the ancient ruins where he used to live, in front of the monument now known as the Altar of the Fatherland or Il Vittoriano, overlooking Piazza Venezia. There, on a street called Via Macel de Corvi, the heirs of Pope Julius II gave him a house because he was still under contract for the tomb of the Pope. Michelangelo resided there for about 30–40 years of his life, and when he died at 89 years old, his body was laid out all night in the church of Santi Apostoli. The next morning, his cousin Leonardo took his body to Florence and had the funeral there, at Santa Croce where he is still buried today.

The last church that Michelangelo created as an architect is Santa Maria degli Angeli, located by Piazza Republica, near to Termini Station where the Baths of Emperor Diocletian are today. Here we will tour this amazing jewel and see how Michelangelo transformed what were once ancient Roman baths into a beautiful Renaissance church.

If you plan to see the Vatican, it is a must to join this guided tour, so you can be prepared and get a view of this great artist and the conflict that he always had with Pope Julius II.