MUSEUMS & GALLERIES · WORLDWIDE
The world’s great collections, one ticket away.
The Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, Van Gogh and the Rijksmuseum, the Acropolis marbles, the Prado, MoMA and the Grand Egyptian Museum. Skip-the-line tickets and guided tours for the museums worth crossing a city for.
One address each
Three masterpieces you can only meet in person.
Prints and posters are everywhere. These three works hang in exactly one room each, in three cities, and standing in front of them is the whole reason for the trip.
Vatican City
The Sistine Chapel
Michelangelo spent four years on his back painting the ceiling, and the Last Judgment took him four more. There is no reproduction, no touring version, no second copy. You see it in one room in the world, after a mile of galleries leading up to it, and you cannot photograph it. Then you simply stand and look.
- 1 Vatican: Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance Ticket
- 2 Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel Tour with Optional Basilica
- 3 Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St Peter’s Basilica Guided Tour
Paris
The Mona Lisa
Leonardo carried her with him for years and never quite called her finished. Today she hangs behind glass in the Salle des Etats, smaller than everyone expects and more guarded than any painting alive. Whatever the crowd, this is the only wall on earth you can meet her gaze from.
- 1 Paris: Louvre Museum Timed-Entrance Ticket
- 2 Louvre Museum Masterpieces Guided Tour with Access
- 3 Paris: Louvre Museum Entry Ticket With Host and River Cruise
Amsterdam
Van Gogh's Own Rooms
More than two hundred paintings, five hundred drawings and the letters in his own hand, gathered in one purpose-built museum by the family who kept them. The Sunflowers, the Bedroom, the late wheat fields. Nowhere else on the planet holds this much of one of the most-loved painters who ever worked.
- 1 Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum Ticket
- 2 Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Entry Ticket
- 3 Moco Museum Amsterdam Entrance Tickets with Banksy & More
If you only book one
The ticket more travellers reach for than any other.
Of every museum on the site, this is the one people plan a whole city break around. A safe place to start.
The classics
The World's Most Popular Museum Tickets
The Vatican, the Louvre, the Van Gogh and the 9/11 Memorial. The collections that fill the front of every traveller's list.
Where to begin
The cities a museum trip is built around.
Rome for the Vatican, Paris for the Louvre, Amsterdam for the Dutch Masters, Athens for the marbles. Start with the city, and the great collections fall into place around it.
Before you book
Ticket, guide, or audio?
The first question for any big collection is not which museum, but how to walk in. Three ways through the door, depending on how much you want the walls explained.
Rome · Vatican City
Four miles of galleries, one ceiling.
The Vatican Museums hold one of the richest collections ever assembled: the map gallery, the Raphael Rooms, ancient marbles and tapestries, all of it building toward the Sistine Chapel at the far end. Go early or go late to have the corridors closer to yourself, and book ahead, because the queue at the door can run for hours.
Read the guide: the best Vatican tickets & tours →The new museums
Art that moves, projects and surrounds.
Not every great collection is centuries old. Banksy and Basquiat at Amsterdam's Moco, Van Gogh thrown forty feet high in immersive light shows, teamLab's mirrored digital rooms and the illusion museums springing up in every capital. Bright, modern, and made to be walked through rather than studied from a distance.
See the modern & immersive museums →The ancient world
Standing where the marble was first carved.
Some collections were never meant to live behind glass. The Acropolis marbles above Athens, the temples at the heart of the Capitoline, the pharaohs gathered at the foot of the Giza pyramids. The oldest museums on earth are partly the buildings themselves, and you walk through the history rather than past it.
The Acropolis & ancient Greece →Amsterdam
A square mile of golden-age painting.
Three of the great galleries sit within a short walk of each other on the Museumplein: the Rijksmuseum and its Rembrandts and Vermeers, the Van Gogh, and the Moco with its street art and Banksys. One afternoon, three centuries of Dutch painting, no taxi required.
- 1 Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum Ticket
- 2 Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Entry Ticket
- 3 Moco Museum Amsterdam Entrance Tickets with Banksy & More
By depth
As far in as you want to go.
A great collection rewards a glance and a whole day equally. See the one work you came for, hand the room to an expert, or make a circuit of the city's best houses in a single visit.
Just see it
Walk straight to the room you came for.Timed-entry and skip-the-line tickets that get you past the queue and in front of the work, on your own clock.
Learn the story
An expert to read the walls for you.Small-group and private guided tours that turn a room of paintings into the story of who made them and why.
Make a day of it
Several collections, one curated day.Multi-stop city and combo tours that string the great houses together, from the headline gallery to the quiet annexe.
Egypt
Five thousand years, under one roof.
The Grand Egyptian Museum beside the Giza pyramids is the largest archaeological museum in the world, and the only place the full Tutankhamun treasure is shown together. Pair it with the pyramids and the Sphinx, or trace the same pharaohs through Turin and the great European collections.
See all 19 Egyptian collections →Museum capitals
Pick a museum capital.
Rome for the Vatican and the Borghese. Paris for the Louvre and the Orsay. Amsterdam for the Dutch Masters. Athens for the ancient marbles. Madrid for the Prado. Barcelona for the Picasso and Gaudi.
By city
Browse museum tours by city.
Pick the city you’re headed to and jump straight to its best museum tickets and tours, from Rome and Paris to Cairo, Madrid and London.
Plan it
A grand-tour long weekend.
First time across Europe's great collections? Here is a three-city circuit that hits the headline museums without a wasted morning.
Just added