Before the gates open to the world, you walk the Vatican’s galleries in near silence and arrive, at last, beneath Michelangelo’s ceiling with almost no one else below it. For a suspended moment the greatest room in Western art belongs to you.

It is one of the rarest, most private accesses on earth—granted on a handful of mornings each year, and to a privileged few.

You move through the Gallery of Maps and the Raphael Rooms while they are still empty, so that the Sistine, when you reach it, can be met in the way its makers intended—in stillness, without the press of the crowd. From there the day can open onto St Peter’s, the whole of the Vatican easing awake around you.