click here to open Virtual Tour

One of the features expected to be popular is a virtual tour of the Vatican museums - especially useful for those daunted by hours of queuing and endless walking required to see the real-life museum's 10 km of galleries. Vatican officials expect the new website will also help tourists get the most out of a physical visit to the museums by enabling them to plan an itinerary through its labyrinthine corridors before physically visiting the premises, and is also considering online ticket sales. The virtual tour allows viewers to explore such masterpieces as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, read about the displays and even zoom into the details of frescoes and artworks.

The project took five years and 15,000 hours of labor to complete, with hardware donated by Hewlett-Packard. At its launch, the site contained 3,200 pages and 165 high-resolution images, and officials said the site would be in continual expansion. (The virtual tours seem to use technology similar to that of Zoomify’s, where the details are downloaded only as one zooms in.) Officials also hope to install wireless ‘hot spots’ in the museums by year’s end, allowing visitors to access an online museums guide via a handheld computer or cell phone.

Archbishop Caludio Maria Celli, who oversees the Vatican’s Internet office, said that the Vatican’s 8-year-old website now averages about 60 million hits a month from surfers in 150 countries. It contains 65,000 church documents and more than 200,000 pages. The Vatican’s security software blocks about 10,000 incoming e-mail-borne viruses and malicious codes every month, and about 30 hacking attempts every week, he said.

The first collections placed online include the museums' most famous: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Rooms and the Pinacoteca, the Vatican’s famous art gallery. Others are those that have been recently renovated or are temporarily closed to the public, like the Etruscan, Egyptian and Missionary museums. The Sistine Chapel virtual tour is an eye level, 180-degree view of the chapel (doesn’t include the ceiling), but photos of the Michelangelo’s frescos, with accompanying detailed descriptions, are available.

Officials said special care was taken to ensure that the broadest possible Internet audience, in every part of the world, could visit the site with ease. That meant making the site compatible with Internet browsing software going back nearly a decade and designing the graphics to load quickly.

U.S. Cardinal Edmund C. Szoka, chief administrator of Vatican City, including the museums, said the site sprung from the church's recognition both of the tremendous potential of the Internet in evangelization and of art's role as a "universal language" that can bring together people of different cultures and religions.

The Vatican Museums originated as a group of sculptures collected by Pope Julius II (1503-1513) and was continued by succeeding popes who opened the art collections to the public in order to promote knowledge of art history and culture. Today the Museums are a complex of different museums and galleries begun under popes Clement XIV (1769-74) and Pius VI (1775-99). Gregory XVI (1931-46) founded the Etruscan Museum with finds from archaeological excavations carried out in Etruria, and later the Egyptian Museum

Vatican Museums has six virtual tours: Gregorian Egyptian Museum, Gregorian Etruscan Museum, Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s Rooms, Pinacoteca and the Ethnological Missionary Museum.

The site can be reached in English. Other languages are also available by starting at the homepage of the Vatican Web site.