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Please click on the titles above or scroll down the page. |
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Rates per vehicle for this
tour:
sedan (1/4 persons) 315 €;
minivan (4 persons) 335 €;
minivan (6/7 persons) 360 €;
minivan (7/8 persons) 400 €. |
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The rates include:
VAT (value added tax 10%), 4 hours of touring in the requested vehicle
conducted by experienced driving guide.
Each additional hour will be charged 1/4 of the total of the tour's
rate.
Rates do
not include:
Entrance fees, meals, drinks, personal purchases or any thing not
specifically listed as included. |
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You'll be met at
your hotel and driven to the Vatican. The tour will start from the
Vatican Museums. It would be preferable to do this tour in the
afternoon, which is when the place is less crowded. In the
winter however, November through March, the Museums close early so you can
only do this tour in the morning. Normally the place isn't to
crowded
the winter anyway. In the winter they close at 12.20 and on summer
at 3.20 pm, Those are the times they stop allowing people in, but
after they close the door one can still stay
for another hour and a half. Normally we visit the Cortile della Pigna, Belvedere, Pio Clementino Museum, the Gallery of Candelabra,
the Gallery of Tapestries, the Gallery of Maps, Raphael's Rooms and
finally the Sistine Chapel. From the Sistine we'll go directly to
St. Peter's Basilica, saving a lot of time which would be necessary
to walk back to the car through other museums, driving around the
outside of the Vatican City walls, find a parking place again and
line up again to walk through the metal detectors in St. Peter's
Square. |
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We will arrive
at St. Peter's after spending about two hours between the Museums
and Sistine Chapel and we'll go about another hour touring the
Basilica. Here we'll see the famous Pietà by Michelangelo and many
other fantastic masterpieces made by artists like Bernini and Canova.
The whole tour is four hours, but you'll be spending about three in
the Vatican. The rest of the time is what it takes to get to the
Vatican from your hotel, walking back to the car from St. Peter's
Basilica and driving back to the your hotel. This tour requires a
lot of walking, you'll be standing or walking slowly most of the
time that you'll spend at the Vatican, plus you'll ha to walk back
from St. Peter's to the entrance to the Vatican Museum where the car
will be parked. |
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Those
who have problems standing or walking for a long time, can use a
wheel chair, available free of any charge at the Vatican Museums,
and go by taxi from where we park the car to the entrance to the
Vatican Museums. That taxi ride is not expensive, about 6 Euros, and
also adds a little more to the tour because you can drive around the
outside of the Vatican and see the walls that separate it form the
city of Rome |
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Rates per vehicle for
this excursion:
sedan (1/4 persons) 540 €;
minivan (4 persons)
570 €;
minivan (6/7 persons) 600 €;
minivan (7/8 persons) 650
€. |
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The rates include:
VAT (value added tax 10%), 8 hours of touring in the requested vehicle
conducted by experienced driving guide.
Each additional hour will be charged 1/8 of the total of the tour's
rate.
Rates do
not include:
Entrance fees, meals, drinks, personal purchases or any thing not
specifically listed as included. |
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Tivoli is closed on Mondays, so
we visit other little towns near Castelgandolfo (and possibly a winery)
instead. |
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This tour combines the tour to one of the most visited places in Rome, the
Sistine Chapel, with an excursion to another very famous place: Villa D'Este
in Tivoli. Sometimes tourists don’t think they have the time to go and see
Tivoli's Villa D'Este or that the place isn't worth the trip.
(Often it's
confused it with the amusement park in Copenhagen.)
Tivoli is a small town 20 miles north-east of Rome and the distance can be
covered in just a little more than half an hour.
Than there's another place, Castelgandolfo,
that’s normally left out of the usual visitor’s itinerary thinking there's
absolutely no time to go see it! We can do it. I can take you to all these
places in one day, comfortably. We'll
not necessarily be visiting them in the same order as they’re listed.
Different opening hours, in the Winter and in the Summer, of the Vatican
Museums and Villa D'Este, cause variations in the program, but normally they
would come in this order. |
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Lots of visitors ignore that in order to visit the
Sistine Chapel they have to go through the Vatican Museums. That's how it is
though, you can't get one without the other. The Museums were opened in 1848 with the
purpose of educating the visitor; so once inside one follows an itinerary that takes him through different stages of the art to finally reach the Sistine Chapel that represents the climax of the Renaissance. There are roughly 1500 rooms in the Vatican Museums, all of them packed with statues, paintings, tapestries, frescoes and even portions of ancient buildings! Of course you don't really have to go through the entire place to see the Chapel, let's say that you walk across 25% of the Museums to get there. The moral of the story is that the tour takes
over 2 hours. |
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After visiting the Museums
we get back in car and drive to Castelgandolfo, about thirty minutes drive from Rome.
This is lovely little town sitting right on the edge of what, millions of
years ago, was
the crater of a volcano and is now a beautiful lake. The town owes its name to
the fact that it developed around the castle of the Gandolfo family. In
the 17th Century the Pope Urban VIII Barberini made of it the Summer
Residence of the Popes and still today the Pope spends there the hottest
months of the year. The general area is also known for its outstanding foods
and there's a lovely little restaurant, right in the old part of town where,
weather permitting, one can have lunch on a beautiful terrace overlooking
the lake. |
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It is a family run restaurant and all the people that work there are really
dedicated and will serve you an unforgettable lunch! Plus Castelgandolfo is
in the area that's famous for its wines, you probably heard of Frascati,
Marino, Velletri... And the young man in charge of the restaurant is an
expert sommelier that can help you make a good choice! We arrive in Tivoli after driving thirty minutes from
Castelgandolfo. What we see in Tivoli is the fabulous villa that was built in
1550 for the Cardinal Ippolito II D’Este. |
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He took advantage of the fact that the villa
was on top of the hill to have is garden, that’s down on the side of it,
decorated with more that four-hundred water fountains. Some of the water
from the nearby Aniene River is in fact feeding the fountains before
returning to the natural course of the river. The system still works today
the same as it did in the Renaissance, no pumps! Depending
on how the tour goes time wise, we could also make a stop, on the way back
to Rome, at Villalba. Just to take a look at the Travertine marble quarries.
They are the quarries from which the
Romans dug the marble they built the Colosseum and practically the
rest of Rome with. |
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