Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel

Don't attempt completeness. The line for you: the Laocoön (dug up in 1506 with Michelangelo present; its agony taught him everything), the Belvedere Torso he called his teacher, the 120 m Gallery of Maps (1580s cartography accurate enough to navigate by), and the Raphael Rooms, where the School of Athens casts Leonardo as Plato and adds a brooding Michelangelo, painted in homage after Raphael peeked at the half-done ceiling next door.

In the Sistine: walk to the far altar end and read the ceiling from there. Nine Genesis scenes painted standing on a flying scaffold of his own design, four years, head bent back. In the Last Judgment, St. Bartholomew's flayed skin wears Michelangelo's own sagging face.

Exiting, photograph Momo's 1932 double-helix staircase: two interleaved spirals where up and down never meet.