Probably Musee d’Orsay in Paris. It holds many of the most famous paintings ever. You can walk right up to each piece and get a close look. And it has several nice cafés where you can sit and have lunch or a coffee. It’s very chill.
By comparison, the Louvre is a mad house, the popular stuff is roped off, and the cafés are more like a snack bar.
If you’re into U.S. (pop) culture, I think it’s hard to beat the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. It’s got historic aircraft, movie props, costumes, etc. Fun stuff. And it’s mostly/all? free so you can spend the day going in and out, having lunch nearby in DC, seeing famous monuments right outside, etc.
Air and Space in DC. You can touch a fucking piece of the moon!
The museum island in Berlin. Just so many interesting artifacts from ancient cultures, you could easily spend multiple days there. (Just don’t think too hard about what all those artifacts are doing in Berlin while you’re there…)
I’m still salty that the Pergamum temple exhibit was closed. We went to Turkey and “sorry, that temple is in Germany now.” We went to Berlin a few years later and “sorry, that temple exhibit is being refurbished now.”
All that being said, I enjoyed seeing that very large gold hat.
Rijksmuseum van oudheden in Leiden in the Netherlands.
As a kid in the early 80s I used to go there often. It was free then and had and still has a lot of artifacts from Egyptian, Roman and Greek history. Also Leiden is a nice place to visit anyway.
I’m enjoying this thread, I’ve been to many of the museums already mentioned and they’re all great.
For me I think my current favourite is the Natural History Museum in New York which I went to a couple of months ago. It was enormous and every room had a few really special things. I learnt so much!
My all time favourite is just so difficult. I really enjoyed The House of Terror in Budapest, I really didn’t know anything about the topic at all and I was thoroughly educated.
I’d also give a special mention to a museum in Rhodes that was full of sculptures they’d pulled from shipwrecks. The geography means there’s a lot of shipwrecks nearby and those date from ancient Greece onwards. The oldest sculptures were well rounded by the water and it gave them a very weird ethereal look.
The natural history museum in nyc is amazing. I went when I was there in January and loved it.
I nearly didn’t go because I’ve been to so many Natural History museums and I had a short time in New York, but then my friend reminded me that Ross from friends worked there and that tipped the scales.
It was so huge though, I got there at opening and there was genuinely a point where I realised I needed to speed up or I wouldn’t finish it before closing time! That’s without any of the special exhibitions too.
