Sistine ChapelHistory & audio guide · Vatican City

You walk in and everyone looks up. It makes sense: the ceiling and the Last Judgement take almost all the attention. But before Michelangelo, this place already had a very concrete function. Pope Sixtus IV rebuilt it between 1477 and 1480 over an earlier chapel, and it was born as one of the most important spaces of papal power. The ceiling, at first, was just a starry sky.

In 1508, Julius II summoned Michelangelo —who considered himself a sculptor, not a painter— and what began as a limited commission became a cosmic story: nine scenes from Genesis, prophets and sibyls, and that almost electric gesture between the fingers of God and Adam. Twenty years later, in a far tenser climate shaped by the Reformation, he returned to paint the Last Judgement. Look there for the artist's self-portrait, hidden in a flayed skin.

And something still happens between these walls: when a pope dies or resigns, the cardinals shut themselves in here to choose his successor, and from the chimney comes the smoke the world watches. Three chapters where art, theology and power stop being separate things.