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…)
We went to the Museum of Sex after we got married in New York City at City Hall. It sure was memorable lol.
My favourite museum is the Whitney Museum in NYC because it has one of the gargantuan paintings by my favourite artist Alex Katz.
Omegamart in Vegas. Might not be a ‘museum’, but is a really cool interactive art facility.
Kennedy Space center is amazing.
The museum of flight in Seattle.
Natural history museum in NYC
And I really love history museums in different cities to learn about their past.
The Wydah Pirate Museum in Cape Cod MA - it’s a smaller museum but it’s packed full of artifacts recovered from the wreck of an actual golden age of piracy ship (the Wydah, Black Sam Belamy’s ship which wrecked in Cape Cod). They have multiple weapons, cannons, and the only confirmed pirate treasure ever recovered. All the artifacts were just super cool, very few recreations of things almost everything is really from the actual wreck. The excavation of the wreck site is ongoing too, the last room in the museum is dedicated to showing how they recover items that have been encased in “concretions” and has lots of items actively being recovered so you can see the process happening.
Idk, I’m a golden age of piracy nerd for sure so this was super cool to me.
Oh that’s so cool!
Natural History Museum in London… before you even get to the exhibits it has some of the most breathtaking architecture.
The Steven Udvar Hazy museum in Dulles VA is another excellent air and space museum. And now that the National Air & Soace museum is being renovated it’s better honestly.
Another great one is the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY. Lots of Buffalo Bill exhibits and the largest gun collection in the world. It’s easily a 2 day museum and unexpectedly great.
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.
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.
