The Borghese Gallery with an art historian

Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, collected the way other people breathe, and in the 1600s he had the young Bernini carve for him. Four of those sculptures are still in the rooms they were made for: Apollo and Daphne, with her fingers turning to laurel leaves; the Rape of Proserpina, with Pluto's hand sinking into her thigh; the David, mid-throw; and Aeneas carrying his father out of Troy. Upstairs and down there are six Caravaggios, Raphael's Deposition, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, and Canova's Pauline Bonaparte, reclining half-naked on a marble couch.

The gallery controls the crowd the way few museums do. Entry is on the hour, from 9am to 5.45pm, Tuesday to Sunday, 180 people at a time, and each slot lasts exactly two hours. Booking is compulsory for every ticket, even the free ones. The official price is 16 euros plus a 2-euro booking fee, 11 for the last slot of the day, and the museum says plainly that there is no skip-the-line, because there is no line to skip: you queue briefly for your hour, and in you go.

Crown Tours' version puts you in a slot with a guide who is an art historian, uses headsets so the guide can talk without shouting over 180 people, and spends the two hours on the masterpieces in the order that tells the story. It costs 49 euros with the ticket, so the guide costs you about 31.

It was rated 4.8 from about 2,250 reviews, with the guides scored 4.9 and the value 4.5. Recent reviews name their guides one by one and praise the same thing: a guide who moves to the next room when one is crowded and comes back when it clears, so the group sees every piece without a wall of backs.

The other way is the official ticket, at 18 euros, with GetYourGuide's ticket-and-audio-guide listing at about the same 49 euros as this tour. If you are going to pay 49 euros, pay it for a person. If you would rather wander, buy the official ticket the moment you know your dates.