Laocoonte del Belvedere -- and beyond -- the Vatican Collection of Ancient Graeco-Roman Statuary

Speranza

The Vatican's Pio-Clementino Museum is one of Rome's best collections of ancient Greek and Roman statues

The Laocoön group in the Vatican Museums. (Photo by Jastrow)

★ Vatican Museums—Pio-Clementino Museum
Viale Vaticano (on the north side of the Vatican City walls, between where Via Santamaura and the Via Tunisi staircase hit Viale Vaticano; about a 5–10 minute walk around the walls from St. Peter's).
tel. +39-06-6988-4676 or 06-6988-4947
www.museivaticani.va or www.vatican.va
Adm
Book tickets: Select Italy or Viator.com

Open Mon–Sat 9am–6pm (last entry: 4pm)* May 4–July 13 and Sept 7–Oct 26 also open Fridays 7–11pm with advance booking (» more)
* Open the last Sun of each month 9:30am–2pm—and it's free!... and terribly crowded
* For other closed dates, see "tips" below

Vatican tours
• Skip the Line: Vatican Museums Walking Tour including Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Rooms and St Peter's
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Context: Arte Vaticana: Our Vatican Tour including Sistine Chapel and St. Peters (with reservations)
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Context: Vatican Collections
• Skip the Line: Vatican in One Day
• Skip the Line: Vatican Museums Tickets
• Private Tour: Vatican Museums Walking Tour
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Context: Vatican for Families
• Private Viewing of the Sistine Chapel and Vatican Museums
• Vatican Friday Nights: Small-Group Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel Tour
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Context: Evening Vatican Tour
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Context: Afterhours Vatican Museums Visit
• Private Tour: Vatican Museums and St Peter's Art History Walking Tour
• Skip the Line: Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel Tour
• Skip the Line: Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel and St Peter's Basilica Half-Day Walking Tour

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This is the best of the Vatican's several ancient Greek and Roman sculpture collections.
In the octagonal Belvedere Courtyard—the original core of the Vatican museums—you'll find the famed ★ Laocoön group, a 1st-century BC tangle of a man and his two children losing a struggle with giant snakes (their fate for warning the Trojans about the Greeks’ tricky wooden horse).

Belvedere TorsoNearby is the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original that for centuries continued to define the ideal male body. As late as the baroque era, a young Bernini was basing his own Apollo in the Borghese Gallery on this one.
In the long Room of the Muses you'll find the muscular ★ Belvedere Torso, a 1st-century BC fragment of another Hercules statue that Renaissance artists like Michelangelo studied to learn how the ancients captured so well the human physique.