From fascinating history to breathtaking works of art, here are our top 10 museums and galleries.

 

1 Vatican Museums, Vatican City
Discover some of history’s most incredible works of art in the world’s smallest independent nation. The Vatican Museums house a priceless collection of paintings, sculptures, artefacts and objets d’art drawn from the whole sweep of human civilisation. The highlight is the breathtaking Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s crowning achievement of exuberantly coloured, flawlessly detailed wall and ceiling frescoes. But don’t miss the other fascinating sections, including the Belvedere Palace, Borgia Apartments, and Pinacoteca (picture gallery), including masterpieces from the brushes of Giotto, Raphael, Leonardo and Caravaggio.

Find Rome holidays
Find Italy holidays

2 Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo
You’ll find a magnificent collection of exhibits from pre-historic Egypt to the Greco-Roman period in the Egyptian Museum. If time is limited, head straight for the jaw-dropping funerary treasure of the boy-king Tutankhamun, including the world-famous gold and lapis lazuli death mask, golden coffin, thrones, chariots and precious jewellery, and the eerie Mummies Room, where the bodies of pharaohs are displayed in temperature-controlled cabinets. If you can spare a few hours more, it is a pleasure to wander from room to room, marvelling at over 130,000 artefacts.  

Find Cairo holidays
Find Egypt holidays

3 Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
The Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum and research complex. If a visit to all 19 of the institution’s museums sounds too daunting, allow us to recommend a few – the Air and Space Museum showcases artefacts including the original Wright 1903 Flyer, the Spirit of St Louis, the Apollo 11 command module and a lunar rock sample that visitors can touch. The National Zoo and the Natural History Museum inspire curiosity and discovery about the natural world.

Find Washington DC holidays
Find USA holidays

4 Museum of the Terracotta Army, Xi’an
Forty minutes from Xi’an is ancient China’s largest imperial mausoleum – the awe-inspiring Terracotta Army, silently guarding the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang for more than 2000 years. This vast museum is home to nearly 8000 life-size terracotta warriors and horses, each exceptionally detailed with unique clothing and facial characteristics, arranged in battle formation. The army and mausoleum is estimated to have taken 700,000 labourers 36 years to finish.

Find Xi’an holidays
Find China holidays

 

5 Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Renowned for a collection including several universally-acclaimed masterpieces, the Uffizi is a must-see when on holiday in Florence, the city of the Renaissance. Enjoy works by masters – from Giotto to Rembrandt – and world-famous pieces such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, Paolo Ucello’s Battle of San Romano and Titian’s Venus of Urbino. And don’t miss a stunning display of Roman and Greek statues, including the Medici Venus.

Find Florence holidays
Find Italy holidays

 

6 Te Papa, Wellington
On the attractive Wellington waterfront, Te Papa – ‘Our Place’ – is the foremost museum of Australasia, preserving and presenting the heritage and treasures of New Zealand. Permanent exhibitions of art, artefacts and costume, along with regular dance performances, introduce the vibrancy and proud traditions of the Maori civilisation.

Find Wellington holidays
Find New Zealand holidays

 

7 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The ‘Met’, on New York’s famous Fifth Avenue, is one of the finest cultural institutions of the world, presenting 5000 years of painting, decorative art, sculpture, artefacts, costume, armour, textiles, music and literature – an astonishing two million items drawn from every point of the compass. Several visits are required to appreciate even an introduction to this vast collection, with highlights including Impressionist masters, classical statuary, medieval icons, illuminated manuscripts, ancient Egyptian funerary objects and the very best of American art.

Find New York holidays
Find USA holidays

 

8 Shanghai Museum, Shanghai
One of Shanghai’s most distinctive buildings, designed to symbolise ‘a round heaven and square earth’, the museum houses 120,000 pieces of China’s finest cultural relics, dating from the Neolithic period to the 20th century (over five millennia). Of particular interest are Tang Dynasty ceramics, Song Dynasty celadon-ware, Shang Dynasty bronzes and exquisite Qing Dynasty jade sculptures, but there are also diverting exhibitions of landscape painting, calligraphy, furniture, costume, embroidery and lacquerware.

Find Shanghai holidays
Find China holidays

 

9 Robben Island, Cape Town
This tiny outcrop, about seven miles off the coast of Cape Town, has been used since the end of the 17th century as a place of isolation. Though a leper colony for almost 100 years, Robben is more famous as a brutal prison institution, with the aim of crushing the spirit of political ‘agitators’ such as Nelson Mandela under the system of apartheid. Visitors to Robben, a museum since 1997, can see the infamous maximum security prison where Mandela spent 27 years and explore the rest of the island in the company of one of its former inmates.

Find Cape Town holidays
Find South Africa holidays

 

10 Louvre Museum, Paris
A former Royal Palace, the Musée du Louvre in Paris has been open to the public since 1793 and houses over 35,000 works of art. Step inside the glass pyramid and descend into the museum to appreciate world-famous works of art up close, including the Venus de Milo and Leonardo di Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Find France holidays

Article added 27 November 2009