Vatican Tours: Brainy Bash or Boring Bust

The Vatican, no matter how you look at it, has not always been very exciting or entertaining unless you happened to love religion or very old things. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that there happens to be a lot of controversy around whether or not the tours of the Vatican City are boring or interesting. The problem is each tour not only depends upon what you are touring but what kinds of things you enjoy on whether or not there are things you’ll be able to have quite an informative and fun experience.

Vatican ToursAlexPears / Travel Photos / CC BY-SA

There are a few other deciding factors though that can turn that boring trip through Vatican buildings into something like a brainy bash.

Tour Guides

Probably one of the biggest concerns with any tour is what kind of tour guide you’ll end up with. A good tour guide can make everything about a Vatican tour different. Some of them can be incredibly informative and knowledgeable and enhance anything you might have learned about the Vatican. While others might not speak the language you know fluently or just not really bother to learn all they can about the Vatican area. The tour guide essential controls the entire pace and understanding and excitement of the tour, if your tour guide is excited about telling all the information and showing all they can then it will spread to the group. You can also gain a lot if the guide has stories to tell about the areas you visit, especially personal ones.

Location

If you hadn’t heard it yet, Location is everything. It may seem strange to say that location still matters in the Vatican, but the Holy See is a full city with all sorts of places to explore and that means there aren’t just churches. When deciding on your tour of Vatican City, make sure you are choosing stuff that actually seems possibly interesting for you. There are church tours, tours following the book Angels and Demons, tours focusing on museums, a focus on the catacombs that run under the Vatican, and even ones that will allow you to have a grand audience with the pope.

Good Position

It may seem like a silly thing but your position throughout the entire tour can make a large difference. Generally being right alongside or right behind the tour guide is the best spots, but if you are also not the type of person who would care about what the guide has to say, being the furthest from the lead of the group can also let you have fun, possibly by doing things the guide is not able to keep track of or see. These two main spots are due to the ability to hear the guide clearly or not have to worry about the guide seeing you if you decide to touch things you are not supposed to, or even run away from your tour (which is probably unlikely).

Know Your Group

The fun of a tour group often comes from the interaction between tour members as well. Even if you do not know anyone else in your tour group, simply conversing and getting to know the people you are touring with can make the entire occurrence far more fun. In fact there are often cases where two people on the tour end up dating after the tour when they had never even know each other before.

As you can see there are more factors than just your tour or it simply being the Vatican area. And if you keep the above factors in mind when you are looking for a tour of the Vatican then you might discover you can enjoy them and they are not just a slog through a lot of boring information you don’t care about.

Sarah Murphy has worked in Dublin for the last two years as a blogger, web content manager and marketing coordinator. A journalist by training and travel junkie by nature, she regularly travels to Italy for both business and to experience some of the Rome tours, where she mostly spends her time in search of the perfect gelato.