Vatican City Travel Forum

Hello. I am hoping to obtain some information about how can i go about arranging a trip to visit the Vatican City during next year's Easter. The things i would like to do are these:
1) tentatively attend Easter masses during the Easter week. hopefully His Holiness will be conducting the masses
2) visit the Vatican Museum within that Easter week or after it. Visit Rome.

I look forward to hear from you. Thank you for your kind attention.

Regards,
Yi

#2. Information about the Vatican Museums can be found at the Vatican website - www.vatican.va or go directly to http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/z-Info/MV_Info_Orario.html for the calendar year 2006. Note that I think that April 16th was Easter this year, so it looks like the Museums were closed only on Easter Sunday and the Monday after.
So you can check this website in the coming months to see the 2007 calendar, but I expect that it will follow the 2006 calendar closely (except for Easter mocing, of course) . Note that the Museums are generally closed on Sundays, except for the last Sunday of the month, when they are not only open, but free (and very crowded).

#1. Finding the schedule for Holy Week is a bit more of a problem - I've never found a simple, reliable source. Look at http://www.vatican.va/liturgical_year/holy-week/2006/index_en.htm for the liturgical calendar for Holy Week for 2006 to give you an idea of what Pope Benedict did on which days. As you can see, the Pope conducted a number of events that week.
However, these events may require tickets. It used to be possible to get such tickets from the American parish in Rome, Santa Susanna (www.santasusanna.org - a good website to go visit anyway), however, they have discontinued this practice because there were so many requests and so few tickets (and the Vatican kept changing the rules on them).
If you are Roman Catholic, probably the best thing to do is to address your local bishop, tell him that you are going to be in Rome next year for Easter, and that you would appreciate his help in acquiring tickets for one or more events (look at the Liturgical Calendar above for the kinds of events there are). A request from your Bishop to an office in the Vatican is more likely to get a response, since the Vatican offices are overwhelmed with requests.

Bill