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An Insider’s Guide to Ultra-Exclusive Private Museum Tours

A cottage industry of fixers, concierges and patron programs has formed around one product: after-hours access to the world's greatest masterpieces.

Picture yourself in a room at the Louvre in Paris, alone, gazing at your leisure at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Ready to wake up? Perhaps you weren’t dreaming. For well-heeled travelers headed to Europe, there are plenty of opportunities to avoid the crowds at the most popular cultural destinations or to see hidden treasures at noble residences, provided they’re willing to pay premium prices.

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Jennifer Frusci Virgilio, managing partner at “lifestyle services provider” Queen of Clubs, arranges specialty guided tours to popular and less well-known sites in France, Italy, Spain and the U.K. These one-, two-, three- and four-hour trips of up to 12 people start at $8,000, though the number of people in a group can change the price, as can the length of the particular visit and the season. “We’ve brought people to the Vatican at 6 a.m. Imagine you and a guide are the only people in the Sistine Chapel,” she told Observer, noting that, during regular hours, guides are not permitted to speak, but at six in the morning there is no prohibition on them doing what the tourists are paying them to do. For that particular experience, the “$8,000 and up” includes an additional $20,000 donation to the Vatican.

“You can just buy a ticket and go,” Virgilio added, “but you won’t get as much out of the experience as what a knowledgeable guide can provide, and you won’t see as much, because we also provide access to places not on the regular visits,” such as otherwise closed rooms at the Vatican and even the Pope’s summer palace.........

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