Raphael RoomsHistory & audio guide · Vatican City

The moment you step in, the space tells you something: these were not rooms you simply passed through. They were the apartment Julius II chose to study and sign documents in, and he handed their walls to Raphael when the painter was just 25. In a few months, the young man turned the first room into a synthesis of Western thought.

There stands the School of Athens, with Plato pointing to the sky and Aristotle to the earth. Look closely: Plato has Leonardo's features, Heraclitus those of Michelangelo, and Raphael himself peers out from one side. But the four rooms aren't decoration: they're a system. Philosophy, theology, poetry and law in the first; miracles and defences of the Church in the second; fires and coronations in the third; and the triumph of Christianity over the Empire in the last, which Raphael designed but never painted —he died in 1520 and his pupils finished it.

Watch how the reigning pope slips again and again into the sacred scenes: none of this was innocent. These frescoes weren't meant to impress tourists, but to persuade. Four chapters, room by room, where the Vatican speaks of intelligence and of power.