Top 5 museum tours

Vatican By Night - Vatican City
The Papal seat is not just a centre of great power and influence, but also a repository of great art treasures. With Get Your Guide&rsquos private night tour of the Vatican museums and the Sistine Chapel, get set to get goosebumps. This fully-guided exclusive tour lasts two hours, and takes you through artworks from Roman, Etruscan and Egyptian antiquities, not to mention the Renaissance tapestries of the Tapes&shytry Gallery, the Gallery of Candelabra, the Gallery of Maps, and the crowning glory of them all &mdash the Sistine Chapel.
Duration 2 hours
Price $585.21 per person, getyourguide.com

Travel With The Met - Worldwide
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is, to state the obvious, one of the best of its kind in the world. But if you would like to move beyond the museum&rsquos jaw-dropping exhibits, how about planning a holiday with them to see the cultures where many of the artefacts come from You could choose to explore, say, the Viking legacy with a long cruise of Reykjavik to Bergen, or the 1st millennium Buddhist-Hindu kingdoms of SE Asia, gaze at Baroque manor houses in Portugal from a cruise on the Duoro or the architectural marvels of Mexico. Guided by art historians and curators and with over 25 annual trips to choose from, this is luxury and culture in one unbelievable package.
Price From $4,995

The Getty Tour - Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum may not be as famous as Hollywood, but it&rsquos certainly one of the highlights of LA. Nestled in a vast complex in the Santa Monica mountains, it is one of the richest private collections anywhere. No wonder then that you&rsquod have to fork out a hefty bit for an exclusive day-long tour of the Richard Meyer-designed complex and the deathless artworks that it showcases in all their splendour.
Price $349 per person, anothersideoflosangelestours.com

Exclusive Moma - New York
Well, it&rsquos an old complaint with the most popular museums in the world &mdash sometimes all you get to see are the crowds, and not much of the art. There is of course much to be seen at the MoMA. The exhibits are in discreet and excellently designed spaces, you wander from room to room gazing at art such as van Gogh&rsquos The Starry Night, Picasso&rsquos Les Demoiselles d&rsquoAvignon, but the crowds do get in the way.

Being the considerate museum that it is, MoMA allows you to enjoy the exhibits at leisure by signing up for a before- or after-hour personalised tour of the museum. These tours last an hour, and you&rsquore accompanied by a Museum lecturer. You could either choose to check out special exhibitions, or do a tour of some of the permanent exhibits. So go ahead and spend some time in the superb Mies van der Rohe archive or stare at Andy Warhol prints, and not the heads of gaping tourists
Price Before hours $63 per person after hours $75, moma.org

Uffizi Guided Tours - Florence
If Florence is one giant mu&shyseum, then the Uffizi is its best gallery. Cosimo I de&rsquo Medici&rsquos grand 16th cen&shytury palace is a remarkable bit of Renaissance heri&shytage itself, but what lies in it are some of the finest paintings in the world. It is basically a repository of the Renaissance, so no wonder that such an exclusive museum would also have some of the highest ticket prices anywhere. But even then, given the thousands of people queuing up everyday, you might not get the chance to see the Botticellis and Michaelangelos up close and personal. So book a guided tour, one that will give you a dedicated hour and a half with 25 or so of the best paintings in the museum.
Price &euro47.50, florence-tickets.com