Museo Storico Vaticano (San Giovanni)

The Vatican Historical Museum was founded in 1973 and transferred in 1987 to the Pope’s Apartment on the first floor of the Lateran. The apartment was restored under Paul the Fourth and consists of ten halls frescoed in the Mannerist Age (the hall called of the Conciliation decorated with views and allegories related to the papacy of Sixtus the Fifth is outstanding) and presents French tapestries (eighteenth century Gobelins, partly donated by Napoleon the First to Pious the Seventh), Roman tapestries (of St. Michael papal manufacture), furniture (fourteenth-nineteenth century), arms (sixteenth-seventeenth century), and wooden sculptures (thirteenth-fifteenth century). Instead the Collections include a set of portraits of the Popes from the sixteenth century to our days, a documentation of the papal ceremonial no longer in use and sixteenth-seventeenth century relics of the Papal Military Corps. The Coach Pavilion is arranged in a room below the Square Garden annexed to the Museum. In addition to the coaches that belonged to popes and cardinals it exhibits also the first automobiles used by the Popes.