The best museum virtual tours you can take without leaving home

From the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum to a Berlin museum closed for renovation where virtual access is the only way in

Rictor Norton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The case for visiting a museum in person is real and not worth dismissing: the scale of a painting, the texture of a sculpture, and the physical experience of moving through a grand architectural space are things that a screen cannot replicate. But the case for virtual museum access is equally real and equally specific. A virtual tour requires no flights, no queues, no timed-entry tickets, and no adjustment to the museum’s opening hours. It costs nothing and ends when the visitor decides to end it. For the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which is currently closed for a multi-year renovation, virtual access is the only option for most of the collection until at least 2027.

The institutions that have built genuinely useful virtual tours have done so through two primary platforms: Google $GOOGL Arts & Culture, which provides Street View-style navigation through museum galleries for hundreds of institutions globally, and the museums’ own websites, where some institutions offer immersive 360-degree experiences or curated online exhibitions that go beyond what Google’s platform provides. The best virtual tours are not filmed walkthroughs or promotional videos. They are navigable environments where the visitor controls the direction, speed, and duration of the experience, and where the ability to zoom in on specific works gives the virtual encounter a quality of close looking that the physical museum, with its required distances from objects, sometimes prevents.

The 10 virtual museum experiences below appear in Travel Leisure, drawn from a list of 16 covering institutions across four continents. Each offers a distinct reason to visit virtually — whether the physical institution is inaccessible due to distance, renovation, crowds, or cost — and each delivers a navigable experience of a collection that rewards the attention.

1. The British Museum gives virtual visitors Street View access to the Rosetta Stone and beyond

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The British Museum’s virtual tour drops visitors into the Great Court, the soaring glass-capped central space that a 2000 redesign transformed into one of the most architecturally significant interior spaces in European museumology. From the Great Court, the tour allows Street View-style navigation into the Egyptian sculpture gallery, where the Rosetta Stone is viewable in high-resolution detail at a proximity and duration that the physical museum’s crowd patterns and protective barriers rarely allow. The combination of landmark object and navigable approach gives the virtual tour a clarity of encounter with one of the world’s most significant historical artifacts that the in-person experience, however valuable, often lacks through distance.

The galleries accessible through the virtual tour extend beyond Egypt to ancient Greek statues and vases, Aztec artifacts, including the double-headed serpent sculpture, and rare Chinese artifacts with digitized scrolls. The range gives the virtual visit a geographic and chronological sweep that reflects the British Museum’s encyclopedic collecting history without requiring the hours it takes to navigate the physical building’s eight million permanent objects. Visitors who use the virtual tour to identify specific objects and galleries before an in-person visit can compress the orientation process significantly and spend more of their physical time in front of specific works.

The British Museum’s virtual access gives geographically remote visitors a practical entry point into one of the world’s most significant collections, which physical barriers of distance and cost would otherwise make inaccessible. For the majority of the world’s population, for whom a trip to London is not a near-term possibility, the virtual tour is the primary mode of access to the Rosetta Stone and the objects alongside it.

2. The Vatican Museums offer virtual access to the Sistine Chapel without shoulder-to-shoulder crowds

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The Vatican Museums’ virtual tour provides access to more than a dozen galleries and ornate spaces within one of the most visited museum complexes in the world, which means that the primary practical advantage of the virtual version — avoiding the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd density that the physical Sistine Chapel generates at peak hours — is also its most significant experiential one. Michelangelo’s ceiling and the Last Judgment on the altar wall can be examined at the visitor’s own pace in the virtual environment, with the ability to pan across the full expanse of the painted surface without the neck strain and crowd pressure of in-person viewing.

The Raphael’s Rooms, where every surface of wall and ceiling is covered in Renaissance frescoes, are navigable through the virtual tour, offering visitors continuous immersion in the painted surfaces that the frescoes reward. The lesser-trafficked spaces accessible through the tour — including the Pio-Clementino Museum and the Room of the........

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