Michelangelo's Secret Room sold out in three days. Granted another month of visits

Michelangelo’s secret room sells out in just three days. The news of the three-month extension (from April to June 2024) to visit the small room adjoining the New Sacristy, announced by Museums General Director Massimo Osanna, who took over as interim director of the Bargello Museums, given following the positive outcome of the environmental monitoring, sent fans into raptures causing tickets to sell out in just three days.

Thus, in agreement with Bargello Museums officials, Hosanna decided to extend the experimental opening of the secret room for one more month - until July 31 - and in the same manner.

Reservations for the month of July, which will be active starting Thursday, Jan. 25, will give visitors the opportunity to access - in limited groups of a maximum of four people at a time - the small and evocative room containing a series of drawings attributed to Buonarroti discovered in 1975 by then-director Paolo Dal Poggetto. The room, which will be open for the first time in a regulated manner to visitors starting mid-November 2023, is 10 meters long and 3 meters wide, 2.50 meters high at the apex of the vault, and contains a series of figure wall drawings, traced with charred wood sticks and sanguine, of various sizes, in many cases overlapping, which Dal Poggetto attributed mostly to Michelangelo.

Dal Poggetto speculated that the artist had taken refuge in the small room in 1530, when the Prior of San Lorenzo, Giovan Battista Figiovanni, hid him from the vengeance of Pope Clement VII, who was enraged because the artist, during the period when the Medici were driven out of the city, had served as a supervisor of the fortifications for the brief period of republican rule (1527-1530). Having obtained the family’s pardon, after about two months-which, according to reconstruction, should be between the end of June and the end of October 1530-Michelangelo finally returned free and resumed his Florentine assignments again, until he finally left the city for Rome in 1534. The drawings, which are still being studied by critics, were, according to Dal Poggetto’s thesis, made during the artist’s period of “self-reclosure,” who allegedly used the walls of the small room to “sketch out” some of his projects including works for the New Sacristy, such as the legs of Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, quotations from antiquity, such as the head of the Laocoon, and projects referable to other sculptures and paintings.

The secret room is accessible by reservation only, to a maximum of four people per accompanied group, up to a limit of 100 people per week. It is open on Mondays (at 3, 4:30 and 6 pm), Wednesdays (at 9 am, 10:30 am, 12 noon, 1:30 pm, 3 pm, 4:30 pm, 6 pm), Thursdays (at 9:00, 10:30, 12:00, 13:30, 15:00), Fridays (at 15:00, 16:30, and 18:00), and Saturdays (at 9:00, 10:30, 12:00, 13:30, 15:00, 16:30, 18:00). The maximum stay inside the room is 15 minutes, accompanied by the Museum’s security staff. Since access to the room requires descending a narrow and cramped staircase, the room is not accessible to the disabled and, for safety reasons, to children under 10 years old.

The entrance ticket costs 20.00 euros per person (2.00 euros the reduced ones; free for children under 18) to which will be added the cost of the compulsory reservation (3 euros) and the price of the entrance ticket to the Medici Chapels Museum (9 euros full, 2 euros reduced). A total of 29.00 euros plus compulsory reservation (3 euros) for full tickets and 5 euros plus 3 euros compulsory reservation for reduced tickets.

Michelangelo's Secret Room sold out in three days. Granted another month of visits

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