If you are in the United States, you don’t need a passport to walk through ancient history. Some of the world’s most extraordinary antiquity collections reside in the US. From colossal 13-ton sphinxes and fully reconstructed Roman palace courtyards to sacred Maya artifacts and 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, American institutions preserve breathtaking glimpses of human origin. Whether you are a seasoned history buff or a curious traveler, these world-class research centers and university museums offer an immersive journey into our planet’s greatest ancient civilizations.

1. How Chicago’s ISAC Museum Reshaped Near Eastern Archaeology (Chicago, IL)

Located on the University of Chicago campus, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) is a world-class research museum holding a large collection of artifacts from the ancient Middle East and North Africa.

The Institute’s founder, James Henry Breasted, dreamed of creating a “laboratory for the study of the rise and development of civilization.” In 1919, with the financial help of John D. Rockefeller, that is exactly what he did.

On display across ten different galleries is the vast collection of material culture from some of the oldest civilizations in human history, including bronze figurines from Anatolia, gold jewelry from Persia, and Cuneiform tablets recording the epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia. One of the main attractions is the Khorsabad Court Gallery, which displays authentic monumental stone reliefs and a 40-ton lamassu excavated from the palace courtyard of Assyrian king Sargon II (721 to 705 BC).

Breasted was the first American to obtain a PhD in Egyptology, so it makes sense that the Institute also boasts a particularly interesting Egyptian history gallery. The collection includes over 800 Egyptian objects from roughly 5,000 BC to 600 AD. Many were brought back from university expeditions or purchased in the early 20th century by Breasted himself. Highlights include the mummy of Meresamun, a temple singer, and a written account of the first recorded labor strike in history.

The Institute is also a scholarly research center, undertaking research and archaeological projects in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The majority of the museum’s 350,000 artifacts were excavated by the Institute’s archaeologists and grad students. It continues to promote fieldwork in the Middle East and North Africa today for both professional and aspiring archaeologists.

2. Inside the Penn Museum and the Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia (Philadelphia, PA)

Located on Pennsylvania University’s campus, the Penn Museum is a top-tier museum when it comes to the study of ancient cultures from around the world. It has a 300,000 square foot exhibit space containing artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean world, Anatolia, East Asia, North and Central America, and Africa. The museum highlights objects from its own archaeological excavations and anthropological fieldwork.

Arguably one of the most visited galleries in the museum is their Ancient Egypt and Nubia Exhibit. One of the largest Egyptian collections in the world, the gallery contains countless objects and artworks representative of the daily lives and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, as well as treasures that belonged to the pharaohs.  A big draw in the exhibit is the Sphinx of Ramses II, a large 13-ton granite sphinx carved sometime between 1293 and 1185 BC and is the largest sphinx in the Western Hemisphere.

The Penn Museum is also home to the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM). CAAM offers laboratory and classroom facilities, materials, equipment, and expert personnel to mentor Penn students in a range of scientific techniques crucial to archaeologists and other scholars as they seek to interpret the past. This makes it one of the top schools in the country for pursuing archaeology and anthropology.

3. Step Inside the Getty Villa for Immersion in Classical Antiquity (Los Angeles, CA)

The Getty Villa Museum is one of the more unique museums to visit on this list. What is special about the Villa is that it is a recreation of a countryside estate from the Roman town of Herculaneum called the Villa dei Papiri (Villa of Papyruses). Visitors are transported back to the time of Caesar and Pompey as they wander through the lush gardens or learn how an impluvium works, making for a much more immersive experience.

On display are artworks from the Getty’s ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Roman collections. The museum is separated into two floors with the exhibits flowing chronologically, starting with the Stone Age and going through the end of the Roman Empire. Mosaics, statues, frescoes, pottery, and fine jewelry are just a handful of the objects that adorn the galleries of this traditional Roman villa.

One of the key pieces is a statue called Victorious Youth. It is one of the few life-sized Greek bronze statues to have survived to the present day. It provides much information on the technology of ancient bronze casting, making it a critical find.

Another beautiful statue in the collection is Leda and the Swan, which is inspired by the Greek mythological tale of Zeus, who disguised himself as a swan to seduce Leda, the Queen of Sparta. More than two dozen examples of this statue exist today, mostly Roman replicas of the Greek originals, attesting to the story’s popularity and Greek influence on the Romans.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Its Monumental Treasures (New York City, NY)

Arguably the most well-known museum on this list, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (informally known as The Met) is home to over 1.5 million works of art spanning 5,000 years, and its 633,000-square-foot footprint makes it the fourth-largest museum in the world by floor area. The museum features art spanning 5,000 years of human history and from every corner of the globe. That being said, their ancient art exhibits are nothing short of extraordinary.

The museum’s Egyptian exhibit alone is made up of 38 galleries with beautiful works from all periods of Egypt’s history. Highlights include massive statues of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, intricately decorated coffins of high officials, and recreated tomb art from the Old Kingdom (c. 2700 to 2200 BC). One of the main attractions is the Temple of Dendur, a Roman-period temple to the goddess Isis which was taken apart in Egypt before being shipped and put back together in the US as a gift from the Egyptian government in the 1960s.

The Met’s Greek and Roman art exhibit is just as exquisite, with over 5,300 objects on view from the many different periods of the two Mediterranean civilizations. The main draw is the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court. It is a monumental, skylit peristyle for the display of Hellenic and Roman art with a soaring two-story atrium. Objects worth seeing include bronze sculptures from Classical Greece, marble portraits of Roman emperors, and frescoes from a Roman villa. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

The Met also boasts a world-class research center with a focus on several topics including conservation and provenance.

5. Exploring Daily Life in the Ancient Mediterranean at the Kelsey Museum (Ann Arbor, MI)

Situated on the University of Michigan campus, the Kelsey Museum houses a collection of more than 100,000 ancient and medieval objects from the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. Among its most significant holdings are 45,000 daily-life objects from the Greco-Roman town of Karanis in Egypt, the largest collection of its kind outside of Cairo.

A unique feature of the Kelsey’s ancient Rome exhibit is a reproduction of murals from the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. The murals depict a young bride-to-be as she goes through the stages of initiation into a Bacchic mystery cult before her wedding day. In 1924, Francis Kelsey (the museum’s founder) commissioned Italian artist Maria Barosso to replicate the Pompeian murals, but Kelsey died before they were completed. When they were shipped to the US, they sat in storage for decades, with only a few panels being put on display once in a while for special programs. It was not until 2000 that the murals were displayed in their entirety for an exhibition on cultic rites practiced by Roman women.

The museum also works with the Archaeology, History, and Classical Studies departments at the university to sponsor field research in the Mediterranean region and Middle East. Like Breasted with the ISAC in Chicago, this program has a long tradition dating back to Kelsey himself going on expeditions to Egypt and Mesopotamia in the early 20th century and procuring many of the artifacts found in the museum today. Work today focuses on sites in Italy, Greece, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, and Tunisia, and is arguably one of the best archaeology programs in the US.

6. Discovering Old Kingdom Egyptian Splendor at the MFA Boston (Boston, MA)

Founded in 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is a world-renowned institution housing around 450,000 objects and artworks ranging from Egyptian mummies to contemporary paintings. Its Greek and Roman art exhibit is truly a marvel.

The main antiquities wing underwent a recent transformation, creating a grand entrance to the exhibition and new displays to highlight key pieces in the collection. Early Greek pottery, Roman marble portraits, mythological scenes, and daily life objects, such as coins, jewelry, and lamps, are just a few of the objects on display. One of the highlights of this collection is a colossal statue of the Roman goddess Juno, which was traditionally claimed to be made for the Theater of Pompey in the 1st century BC, but probably comes from the 2nd century AD. The statue then traveled from place to place over the centuries, being housed in several private estates before coming to the Fine Arts Museum.

The museum’s Egyptian art exhibit is one of the most extensive in the world outside Cairo, containing over 16,000 pieces spanning from 6,500 BC to 600 AD. Among these are 140 funerary objects, including richly painted coffins, canopic jars, embalming tools, and anything else involved in burial rituals and preparing the soul of the deceased for their journey to the afterlife.

7. Why the Michael C. Carlos Museum Is the Southeast’s Antiquities Hub (Atlanta, GA)

The Michael C. Carlos Museum is located on Emory University’s campus just outside downtown Atlanta, and pretty much specializes in all things ancient. Their galleries feature artifacts from Africa, the Americas, ancient Egypt, Nubia, the Near East, ancient Greece, Rome, and South Asia.

The museum’s collection of Greek and Roman Art comprises over 5,400 Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Cypriot, and Bronze Age Aegean artifacts. Mythology was a major part of the Mediterranean peoples’ everyday lives, as evidenced by the plethora of objects (including oil lamps, statuettes, ceramics, and more) depicting Greek and Roman gods and goddesses in this collection.

The museum began in the 1920’s with a set of Roman coins and expanded piecemeal throughout the 20th century. It has developed into one of the most significant collections of Greek and Roman art in the American Southeast.

The museum also notably holds one of the most extensive collections of Native American art in the country, setting it apart from others on this list. It has more than 3,300 ancient and contemporary pieces from North, Central, and South America, spanning 4,000 years. Their ancient Costa Rican collection is of particular interest, including greenstone ceremonial axes and stone metates (grinding stones).

8. How the Nelson-Atkins Museum Preserves Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Art (Kansas City, MO)

Many would not think of Kansas City for their fine arts scene, but the Nelson-Atkins Museum has a surprisingly large and elaborate collection of antiquities. Their ancient art collection spans more than 4,000 years of history from the Near East, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations.

The Egyptian galleries contain an extensive collection of stone portraiture depicting prominent pharaohs and queens, spanning from Sen-useret III and Ramses II to Nefertiti and the Ptolemaic rulers. Particularly significant is the 2007 acquisition of the funerary items of the noblewoman Meret-it-es. Comprising two coffins, cartonnage, and 304 servant statuettes, the assemblage collectively occupies nearly an entire gallery space.

These eight extraordinary museums bring the wonder of ancient civilizations right to our doorstep. From world-class university research labs to monumental metropolitan galleries, these institutions prove that exploring the deep past doesn’t require crossing an ocean.

Medieval castles were much more than towering residences for ruling elites. They were formidable fortresses, administrative centers, and physical expressions of political power. From the stone bastions of Northern Europe to the soaring timber frameworks of Japan’s castles, these eight magnificent strongholds stand today as enduring monuments to human ingenuity, strategic design, and the turbulent history of the medieval era.

1. Edinburgh Castle, Scotland (11th Century)

Edinburgh Castle, sitting high atop the city bearing the same name, started life in the early 11th century when King Malcolm III established the first recorded castle on the site. Future kings would add pieces. King David I added St Margaret’s Chapel in honor of his mother in 1130, and it is the oldest standing building in Edinburgh today. David’s Tower was constructed by David II in the 1370s-1380s following destruction during the Wars of Scottish Independence. In 1510, King James IV added the Great Hall, and in the 1570s, the Half Moon Battery was erected to rebuild the fortress after it was severely damaged in the Lang Siege.

The castle was at the center of many conflicts in Scottish history. During the late 13th and 14th centuries, the fortress changed hands repeatedly between English and Scottish forces. Robert the Bruce then famously ordered the castle’s defenses destroyed so it could not be held by English forces. In the 16th century, the castle was held by loyalists for Mary Queen of Scots, enduring a two-year artillery bombardment that destroyed much of its medieval architecture. She also gave birth to James VI there, who would become King James I of England.

Today Edinburgh Castle is a war memorial and popular tourist destination, welcoming around two million visitors each year.

2. Windsor Castle, England (11th Century)

Nestled in the county of Berkshire, Windsor Castle could be one of the world’s most famous structures. One undisputed fact: Windsor Castle is the oldest inhabited castle. Started by William the Conqueror in the 11th century as part of a ring of defensive castles around London, subsequent rulers made improvements. It was originally a Norman Castle of wooden motte-and-bailey design, but was transformed into heavy stone fortifications under King Henry II and King Edward III, who started to use the castle as an official residence around 1350.

Though not a genuinely Gothic castle, Windsor contains many Gothic features. St George’s Chapel, built in 1348, has flying buttresses, pointed arches, and large stained-glass windows. The Round Tower, in the Castle’s center, was a central defensive point.

The British Royal Family uses Windsor Castle as a weekend residence. It is also the setting for when a citizen receives an award from the Royal Family. The State Apartments house world-famous artwork by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, alongside armor worn by King Henry VIII.

3. The Alhambra, Spain (12th Century)

Alhambra Castle in Granada, southern Spain, is situated on a hill as an imposing fortress complex. The Moors (Muslim inhabitants of Spain) built the Castle atop Roman ruins in the 12th century. After the Christian Reconquest in 1492, it became a royal place. In 1527, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V commissioned a massive Renaissance-style palace right in the middle of the Islamic Nasrid complex, creating a striking visual contrast between Renaissance and Moorish architecture.

The imposing external fortress structure is juxtaposed with delicate internal design features. Among Alhambra’s features are reflecting pools, fountains, and channels. These embody paradise in Islamic culture. The Court of the Lions has a central fountain braced by a dozen marble lions. The ornate décor, featuring geometric patterns and calligraphy, adorns many of the rooms.

To combat the intense Andalusian heat, Nasrid engineers diverted water from the Darro River over six kilometers away using complex hydraulic channels. Running water, shaded courtyards, and deep basins act as natural evaporative cooling systems throughout the palaces

4. Eltz Castle, Germany (12th Century)

Eltz Castle is hidden in a forested valley above the Moselle River in Germany and has continuously expanded since the twelfth century. It is one of only two German castles among dozens never to have been destroyed and rebuilt. The castle has been held by the Eltz family since at least 1157, making it one of the very few historic estates continuously lived in and preserved by the same lineage for over 800 years. Because it escaped fire and sacking, its interior rooms contain rare 500-year-old original furnishings, armaments, tapestries, and gold artifacts preserved across centuries.

In 1268, three Eltz brothers divided the family inheritance but agreed to share the castle. Different branches of the family built their own separate tower houses and living spaces on the rock, resulting in the castle’s unique, multi-turreted “fairytale” skyline. Today, Eltz Castle is known for blending Gothic, Baroque, and Romanesque architecture. Boasting eight 35-meter-high towers and timber frames, this Castle makes for an unusual sight. Set amidst a natural preserve, visitors get a medieval castle’s full look with no modern structures around.

5. Himeji Castle, Japan (14th Century)

Japan, with its iconic militaristic samurai heritage, is no stranger to castles. With 100 remaining from feudal times, Himeji Castle’s construction began in 1333 and expanded massively in the 17th century. But of surviving Japanese castles, only 12 retain their historic wooden central keeps. Himeji is the largest, most complete, and best preserved of these 12 original castles. Due to the plaster-covered walls and its soaring roofs, Himeji is nicknamed “White Heron Castle,” as it looks like a soaring white bird.

Like many fortresses, Himeji Castle is a hilltop fort. Unlike European castles built of stone, timber framing provides the backbone. Thick, wooden walls, plastered in white paint, give Himeji its bright appearance. The base is stone, like most Japanese castles. Castle defenses are very intimidating to any attacker. Himeji’s defenses take on unusual parts, like a maze-like pathway to slow or confuse attackers. A more brutal defense is the stone drop windows or ishi-otoshi; defenders dropped rocks onto their besiegers’ heads. But while it was designed for war, the castle has never been attacked.

6. Malbork Castle, Poland (13th Century)

Malbork Castle started life as the Teutonic Knights’ headquarters in Malbork, Poland. These German Roman Catholic knights ruled much of Europe at the time, and originally named the castle Marienburg, in honor of the Virgin Mary. In 1309, Grand Master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen moved the headquarters of the entire Teutonic Order from Venice to Malbork, transforming the fortress into the administrative and military capital of their Baltic state.

Red bricks were characteristic of Teutonic buildings due to a lack of stone. The castle is estimated to comprise between 30 and 50 million handmade bricks. Construction began in 1274, with the final parts added by 1406. By then, Malbork Castle covered an impressive 44 acres or 143,591 square meters. It includes three tiers. The High Castle is the oldest and most heavily fortified section, housing the convent, chapter house, and Church of St Mary. The Middle Castle has the Grand Master’s Palace and vast banquet halls for receiving Europe’s nobility. The Low Castle is home to the armories, stables, granaries, breweries, and other day-to-day essentials.

The Teutonic Order lost the Castle in 1410 when it fell into the hands of mercenaries. Poland purchased the castle from them in 1457 during the Thirteen Years’ War. Over time and due to neglect, Malbork had fallen into disrepair by the 1940s, and then more than half the castle was destroyed in World War II. A thorough post-war effort restored the Castle to its initial appearance. Today, it serves as a museum.

According to SIL International, there are over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Most people have a single first language, and about 40% of people speak a second language fluently. This is more common in multicultural countries like Indonesia, where two-thirds of the population is bilingual, compared to about 20% in the United States. While some languages are clearly related, such as Spanish and Portuguese, other languages have completely different lexical and grammatical features. For example, English speakers often struggle with the tonal nature of Chinese and the unfamiliar written characters. How hard it is to learn a new language often depends on the languages you already know. What languages are considered the hardest for English speakers?

Understanding Language Families

Learning a language that is closely related to the learner’s first language is generally easier than learning an unrelated language. Therefore, for English speakers, many other European languages are easier to learn than, for example, Vietnamese, Nahuatl, or Navajo!

The closer a language is on the linguistic family tree to English, the easier it is for an English speaker to learn. English belongs to the Germanic group of languages, which also includes German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Afrikaans.

Germanic is part of the broader Indo-European family tree, and about 40% of the global population speaks Indo-European languages. Within this tree, Germanic languages are closely related to Romance languages, derived from Latin (spoken by the Romans), including French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. These languages will usually be easier for an English speaker to learn than a more distant language, such as Arabic.

Another major group of European languages is the Slavic group, which includes Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Croatian.

Other European languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, belong to the Uralic Language group and are even further removed from English. Finnish and Hungarian have even gained reputations as being notoriously difficult to learn.

Foreign Service Institute Ranking

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the United States’ primary training institution for members of the US foreign service community. As such, the FSI is responsible for helping professionals and other diplomats learn languages to promote US foreign policy. The FSI categorizes languages based on how easy they are to learn from an English perspective. Languages are ranked from Category I (easiest) to Category V (hardest). Category I includes languages that require 24-30 weeks (600-750 hours) to learn. Several Germanic and Romance languages fall into this category, and include Norwegian, Afrikaans, French, and Spanish.

Although German is closely related to English, it has significant complexities that differentiate it from English and make it a more difficult language to learn than Category I languages. It is a Category II language, and learners can expect to master the language only after 30 weeks (750 hours) of intense study. Moving into language groups unrelated to English, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Swahili are category III languages requiring 36 weeks (900 hours) of study.

Category IV Languages require at least 44 weeks (1100 hours) of study, and include Bulgarian, Hindi, Russian, Greek, Czech, Thai, Finnish, Estonian, Tagalog, Xhosa, and Zulu, among many others.

Category V: The Hardest Languages to Learn (From an English Perspective!)

Reaching Category V and requiring 88 weeks (2200 hours) to learn, there are a handful of languages that require intense study to master. These languages are Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese. Of these languages, Japanese, with its differing syntax, three different writing systems, and complicated hierarchy of etiquette, is considered the most difficult.

If you were to stand in the Roman ruins of the Colosseum on an afternoon in July, the worst you’d face would be oppressive heat and a sweaty shuffle toward the exit. Nearly 2,000 years ago, that very same spot looked down on blood-soaked sand raked clean between slaughters, your throat itchy as the air filled with thick, rancid smells.

While we love romanticizing ancient Rome as all marble forums and philosopher-emperors, the tragedy is that, for the most part, the empire was held together by systematic killings, a sprawling sex trade, mass enslavement, and executions that doubled as public entertainment.

1. The Mamertine Prison, Rome

Beneath a church at the foot of the Capitoline is a small and thoroughly unappealing stone chamber the Romans reserved for their most loathed enemies. The lower room is shaped like a bottle and, in its earliest phase, the only way in or out was through a hole in the ceiling. Prisoners would be lowered through it and, more often than not, never brought back up. The historian Sallust called the place repellent for its “filth and darkness,” but that seems a bit redundant nowadays, given that it was arguably the entire point.

The prison’s real function was clearest at the end of a triumphant battle, spearheading the victory parade every Roman general longed to lead. While the crowd cheered and the general made his way toward the Capitol, the captured enemy leader was quietly pulled from the procession, taken down into the Mamertine, and strangled out of view.

Vercingetorix, the Gallic chieftain who gave Julius Caesar his toughest fight, was kept alive for years so he could be displayed and then eventually killed in this way. The North African king Jugurtha met a much slower and more agonizing version of the same fate, in the same cell, left to waste away.

By the Middle Ages, the dungeon had been rebranded as a shrine, on the tradition that St. Peter was held there and miraculously brought a spring up from the floor to baptize his jailers.

2. The Brothel of Pompeii

Pompeii has a dark history in every direction, a town frozen at the moment of death. But nature caused this particular disaster, so, somehow, it makes the place feel less sinister than others on this list. But that innocence is only on the surface. Head below ground and you’ll find a building that says more about everyday Roman sleaziness than any collapsed roof: the Lupanar, Pompeii’s purpose-built brothel dungeon.

This cramped two-story block had five small rooms downstairs, each fitted with a built-in masonry bed that would have held a thin mattress. Erotic frescoes, like the one pictured above, are found on the doorways. Some scholars describe them as menus of “services rendered herein,” though that reading is still very much debated. They may simply have been there to set a mood.

More than a hundred messages are scratched into the plaster of the rooms. A fair few seem to have been left by the sex workers themselves, most of them likely enslaved, many with Greek names pointing to the eastern edges of the empire. They recorded their own names and the men they’d been with, sometimes with a boast attached. The going rate, as it was scratched on the walls, was roughly the price of a couple of cups of wine.

The word lupa, “she-wolf,” was slang for a prostitute, which is where lupanar comes from. Oddly enough, the she-wolf is also the revered symbol of Rome today and the emblem of its football team, which makes the whole idea feel infinitely less romantic.

3. The Colosseum, Rome

Most people know the Colosseum as a killing ground, but below the arena floor was the machinery that turned it into something close to an industrial slaughterhouse.

The hypogeum is a two-level warren of tunnels, cages, and lifting gear that Emperor Domitian began adding to the Colosseum about a year after it opened. Around 80 vertical shafts and a set of counterweighted wooden lifts, worked by teams of laborers in torchlight with little air and no daylight, could send a starved lion shooting up through a trapdoor into the middle of the arena in seconds.

Mornings were given over to animal hunts and middays to executions, when condemned prisoners were pushed out to be torn apart by those same ravenous beasts, the punishment the Romans called damnatio ad bestias.

4. The Via Appia and Capua

The Via Appia was the showpiece road of the Republic, a dead-straight ribbon of basalt running south from Rome. In the spring of 71 BC, it became the longest execution site in Roman history.

The story begins about 120 miles south in Capua, where a gladiator school kept men like Spartacus alive only as long as they were useful in the arena. Spartacus and around 70 others broke out using kitchen knives and spits, and within two years, the revolt had swollen into an army that kept embarrassing Rome over and over.

When Crassus finally crushed it, he made sure no one would ever forget who ruled whom. According to Appian, a prominent Greek historian who served as an official in ancient Rome, some 6,000 captured rebels were crucified at intervals along the whole road from Capua to Rome. They were left hanging as a warning to anyone else who got funny ideas about revolution.

5. Baiae, Bay of Naples

If Rome had a Las Vegas, it was Baiae, a seaside resort on the Bay of Naples where the wealthy went to misbehave well out of sight of the Senate. Moralists loathed it, and Seneca grumbled that it was a place where vice ran loose and a stay could wreck a respectable reputation. Much of the old resort has since slipped beneath the sea, dragged down over the centuries by the slow rise and fall of the volcanic ground in the area, so today you can snorkel or take a glass-bottomed boat over sunken mosaics and villa walls.

The dark story attached to Baiae is more of a family saga. It was near here, in 59 AD, that Nero is said to have tried to murder his own mother, Agrippina, with a booby-trapped boat rigged to come apart and sink her at sea. The contraption failed, Agrippina swam ashore, and Nero, having run out of patience with subtlety, simply sent men to finish the job in her villa.

Standing on the stunning shoreline today, with half a Roman party town glimmering under the water just offshore, it’s an oddly peaceful spot for somewhere with that on its record.

FYI, the marble statues scuba divers see on the seabed nowadays are copies. The originals were lifted to a museum and casts set back in their places, so the underwater park still has something to show.

6. The Amphitheater of El Djem (El Jem), Tunisia

Rome did not keep its blood culture at home, of course. The games traveled with the empire as it expanded, and nowhere is that clearer than in a small farming town in central Tunisia, where a stone amphitheater almost on the scale of the Colosseum rises straight out of the flat plain. This was Thysdrus, a place grown rich on the production of olive oil, and its arena could seat something like 35,000 people, roughly the entire population of the town.

A provincial city built one of the largest killing venues in the Roman world essentially to prove it belonged, and to give the locals the same spectacle of animal hunts and staged executions that drew the crowds in the capital.

Construction is usually dated to around 238 AD, the same year Thysdrus erupted in a tax revolt so violent that the mob killed the emperor’s local finance official and declared an elderly local landowner named Gordian emperor on the spot. That ad-lib reign lasted barely a few weeks before it collapsed, and it would seem the arena was never completed. It later doubled as a fortress, sheltering the townspeople during Vandal and Arab attacks, before generations of scavengers quarried it for building stone.

7. Villa Settefinestre, Tuscany

Most of the sites on this list are monuments. This one is a farm.

Villa Settefinestre sat in the rolling countryside near Cosa in southern Tuscany. When archaeologists dug it up in the late 1970s, it became the textbook example of the thing the marble version of Rome leaves out: the large agricultural estate run on slave labor that generated so much of the Republic’s wealth.

The villa belonged to the senatorial Volusii family, and it was built for profit rather than for show, with olive presses, wine cellars, a piggery, and quarters for a workforce that rarely, if ever, got to leave.

Andrea Carandini was tasked with the excavations, and he read the layout as a kind of familiar-looking plantation. He pointed to a block of small, windowless rooms as an ergastulum, the spartan barracks where one would keep chained field slaves at night after a day spent toiling the land under the whip. He compared it openly to the slave plantations of the American South, yet whether those particular rooms really were slave cells is now one of the longest-running arguments in Roman archaeology. Plenty of historians see the comparison as a bit of a stretch, but, knowing what we now know about the ancient Romans, it might not seem such a preposterous assumption.

For most of her life, the Mona Lisa was one semi-important portrait among many, admired by the odd Renaissance scholar but seemingly overlooked by nearly everyone else. Then a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with her under his coat in 1911, and the two-year manhunt that followed turned an unassuming little panel into the most famous face on Earth. Crowds have been chasing her ever since. But just a few steps away from the mob in the Salle des États are five of the museum’s masterpieces enjoying the kind of peace the Mona Lisa lost more than a century ago.

How to Beat the Crowds at the Louvre

The Louvre is quite the sprawling mammoth, set on former royal grounds. It only puts some 35,000 works on show at once, so nobody does it justice in a single day, try hard as they may. Push too hard, and all you end up being is exhausted and cranky in front of a painting behind glass, squeezed among a throng of folks.

The trick to avoid the drama is to skip the Denon wing scrum for your first hour and make for the Richelieu wing instead, which stays oddly uncrowded even at the height of summer. The museum also opens late on Friday evenings, and once the tour groups clear out, the marble halls turn blissfully empty. Pick three or four things you really want to see, then let yourself get pleasantly lost between them.

Note that the following five pieces are not secret, by any means, yet they are often sidelined, which makes seeking them out all the more rewarding.

1. The Five-Legged Lamassu of Khorsabad

Deep in the Richelieu wing, in a courtyard most people march straight through on their way to the Italian paintings, stand two giant winged bulls with bearded human faces. Look at one head-on, and it looks as if it’s planting itself on guard, yet step to the side, and it looks as if it’s striding forward. It’s a trick the sculptors pulled off by carving it with five legs instead of four, each one cut from just a single block of alabaster weighing close to 30 tons.

The pair once guarded the gates of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who grabbed the throne around 720 BC, probably as a usurper, and set out to prove the gods were on his side. His big move was building a whole new capital from scratch in under a decade, a city he modestly named Dur-Sharrukin, or Fortress of Sargon. He barely got to enjoy it, though, as he was killed in battle in 705 BC. Since his body was never recovered, his court took it as a sign the gods were not so approving after all. The omen spooked his son Sennacherib so badly that the young king abandoned the barely used city and moved the capital to Nineveh, leaving Sargon’s fortress to the wind.

You will find the pair today in Room 229, the Cour Khorsabad.

2. The Card Sharp in Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat

At first glance, The Cheat seems to show four ordinary people playing cards. Look again, and you have a sneaking suspicion you’ve just walked into a robbery. On the right, a richly dressed young man frowns at his hand, about to lose his shirt and completely oblivious. On the left, the card sharp is already sliding an ace of diamonds out from behind his belt.

Between them sit a courtesan and her maid, and here is the clever bit: you get the notion that everyone at that table is in on the scam except the victim. You can read the whole scheme in their eyes, the glances flicking between the three accomplices while the young man studies his hand. La Tour seems to suggest that cheating like this was so routine nobody needed to say a word.

Georges de La Tour was a star in his own lifetime, then slid so far out of view after he died in 1652 that scholars only pieced his story back together in the 20th century. This canvas helped a great deal. It surfaced in 1926 with a dealer on the Île Saint-Louis, signature still in the lower left, and hauled his reputation back from three centuries of darkness. Look for it in Room 912 of the Sully wing.

3. Vermeer’s Tiny Masterpiece: The Lacemaker

Vermeer is a household name today, but he had been reduced to something akin to a myth for nearly two centuries after his death. He worked slowly and rarely strayed from Delft, selling most of what he painted to a small circle of local buyers, so even in his lifetime his fame barely reached past his home town. Then came 1672, the year the Dutch still call the Rampjaar, or Disaster Year, when the armies of Louis XIV poured into the Republic and the art market collapsed along with the economy. Vermeer dealt in other painters’ work as well as making his own, and the crash ruined him. He died three years later at 43, woefully deep in debt, leaving his widow Catharina and their 11 surviving children, dealing with a long line of creditors banging at the door. To settle years of unpaid bills, she is said to have even handed the local baker two of her late husband’s paintings just so the family could eat.

For almost 200 years thereafter, the painter all but vanished from the record. Then a French critic named Théophile Thoré-Bürger became obsessed in the 1860s, hunting down the scattered canvases and publishing the research that pulled Vermeer back into the light.

The smallest masterpiece Vermeer ever painted is the one hanging at the Louvre that you ought to seek out. At about 24.5 by 21 centimeters, or roughly 9.6 by 8.3 inches, The Lacemaker is smaller than a sheet of paper, and its strange, almost photographic clarity probably owes something to a camera obscura, the lens-and-box device Vermeer seems to have used to study how light really falls, long before a camera could do the job for him.

4. The Sleeping Hermaphroditus and Bernini’s Marble Mattress

Stare at this reclining marble from one side, and you’ll see a beautiful woman asleep on her front. Walk around to the other side, however, and the body turns out to be both female and male, an astonishing bit of artistic sorcery. The figure is Hermaphroditus, child of Hermes and Aphrodite, who in the myth is fused with a besotted water nymph named Salmacis into a single body.

The sculpture is a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze, though the real highlight is what lies underneath. In 1620, Bernini, barely into his 20s, was paid 60 scudi to carve the mattress the figure rests on, and he made the stone look so plump and yielding, buttoned and dimpled under the weight of the sleeper, that you’ll probably be tempted to reach out and touch it to double-check.

The Borghese family clearly missed it once it was gone, because a second sleeping Hermaphroditus, fitted with its own carved marble mattress, soon took its place back in Rome. The Louvre’s original waits among the Roman antiquities.

5. Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds and That Conspiracy

Most of this painting’s fame rests on four words carved into the tomb, “Et in Arcadia ego.” The Latin is deliberately unfinished, so it works two ways. It can be Death speaking, “Even in Arcadia, I am here,” or the person in the tomb, saying they too once lived in this paradise. Either way, the conveyed message is the same: that however lovely the setting, death is already part of it. The phrase has never been found on any ancient text. Antiquarians in 17th-century Rome seem to have coined it, and it first appears in a 1618 Guercino painting. Art historians have puzzled over that small ambiguity ever since; Erwin Panofsky most famously of all.

Now, none of that is what made the painting famous with the public. From the mid-1900s, conspiracy theorists decided the tomb in the picture was a real one, standing in the south of France near a village called Rennes-le-Château, with a secret clue hidden in it by Poussin himself.

The wildest version, spread by The Da Vinci Code, said that clue pointed to the Holy Grail, reimagined as a hidden bloodline rather than a cup. Believers even found a roadside tomb near the village that looks a lot like the painted one! The snag is that it was built in 1903, and Poussin died in 1665, so if anything copied anything, the modern tomb copied the painting. You can judge the likeness yourself in front of the painting in the Louvre’s French galleries.

Around AD 150, a Greek named Pausanias set out on foot to describe his whole country and left what many call the first travel guide ever written. Read it now, and you’ll notice how the places he singled out 18 centuries ago, Acropolis included, are the same ones pulling the biggest crowds today. Venture past Athens, though, and Greece opens up like a historical atlas. The five sites in this guide run from Delphi, where Greeks came for prophecies, to Delos, an all-but-empty island treated as holy ground. Four filled his pages. The fifth he never reached.

But you can.

First, a Word on Exploring Greece Beyond Athens

Greece might be infamous for boasting some of the biggest tourist crowds in Europe, especially in summer. While this is true to some extent, it really only concerns Athens and some of the most famous islands, like Santorini. The country is expansive and bursting at the seams with UNESCO-listed archaeological sites, and no matter where you drive, you’ll come across a brown heritage sign pointing one out. The local joke is that nobody dares dig a basement pool, for fear of turning up something priceless and losing the land to the archaeologists.

I was absolutely amazed to have had Delphi to myself until mid-morning on my visit, which left me wondering how somewhere this important can stay so quiet. In reality, precious sites are so abundant that the country, outside the Acropolis, absorbs tourist crowds into near oblivion.

So do explore the five ancient Greek sites below and know that you’ll discover so many more along the way.

1. Delphi, Central Greece

For roughly a thousand years, Delphi was where the Greeks would come in search of answers as to what the future held. Kings and generals climbed the slopes of Mount Parnassus to put their questions to the Pythia, the priestess who spoke for Apollo, something they’d usually do before starting a war or founding a colony. The Greeks reckoned this was the center of the world, a spot Zeus had marked with a stone called the omphalos, or navel.

The catch was that the oracle dealt in riddles, which led to some “lost in translation” moments. When King Croesus of Lydia asked whether he should attack Persia, for example, he was told that if he did, he would destroy a great empire. Delighted to no end, onward he marched, only to discover that the great empire he was destined to destroy ended up being his own. Carved at the temple entrance was a sobering piece of advice he should have read first: “know thyself.”

The ruins climb the hillside in tiers, from the Temple of Apollo up to a theater and stadium with a spectacular view over a valley of olive trees. Come early, ahead of the Athens tour buses, and give yourself a couple of hours.

2. Theater of Epidaurus, The Peloponnese

Epidaurus is famous for its theater, but it was actually once a side attraction. It sat inside the Sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of medicine, and people came here sick, hoping to be cured. The treatment was mostly sleep, which sounds immensely reasonable.

Patients bedded down in a hall called the abaton and waited for the god to appear in a dream with a diagnosis, while non-venomous snakes sacred to Asclepius were left to glide through the wards. That snake, by the way, coiled around a staff, is the rod you still see on ambulances and pharmacy signs.

The theater appeared later and seats around 14,000 across 55 rows of limestone. Guides love to stand at the center and drop a coin to prove that a whisper carries to the back. The truth is a little less kitsch than the sales pitch. The limestone does filter out low background rumble and carry a raised voice unusually far, but an actual whisper could never reach row 55, and that hardly matters. The proportions and the peacefulness of the hills make it one of the loveliest ruins in the country. FYI: Search for “Ancient Theatre at the Asklepieion of Epidaurus” on Google Maps, or you might end up at its smaller namesake on the coast.

3. Olympia, The Western Peloponnese

The Olympic Games began at Olympia in 776 BC, and during the festival, the city-states were meant to lay down their weapons and travel in safety to honor Zeus. That was the idea, anyway, although the reality is written into a row of statue bases near the entrance to the stadium.

These were the Zanes: bronze statues of Zeus paid for with fines levied on athletes caught cheating, whether because they had taken bribes or fouled an opponent. Each base carried the offender’s name and his offense, placed so that every competitor had to pass this wall of shame on the way in, and spectators reportedly spat on them as they filed by.

The Temple of Zeus once held Phidias’s gold-and-ivory statue of the god, one of the Seven Wonders and long since lost. So, although you cannot see it, you can still walk onto the original stone starting line in the stadium and stand where the runners crouched, toes wedged into the grooves cut for grip. You can also, if you were so inclined, challenge your fellow travel companion to a 100m sprint. It is tradition, after all. Although…

Did you know? The ancient sprint was not 100 meters but the “stade,” one length of the track, which stretched about 192 meters (629 feet) and is where “stadium” comes from. For the first 13 Olympiads, it was the only race on the program. Now the fun part: competitors ran stark naked and lathered in olive oil (not sure if it was extra virgin or just the regular kind), and a false start earned a public flogging from the judges. You might want to mention that to your companion before you both toe the line.

4. Mycenae, The Argolid

Long before classical Athens, Mycenae was a Bronze Age fortress and, in Homer’s telling, the seat of Agamemnon, the very same who led the Greeks to Troy. You still enter through the Lion Gate, whose stones have been unnerving visitors for more than 3,000 years. Almost everything else about the place, funnily enough, comes wrapped in a wrong name.

When Heinrich Schliemann dug here in 1876, guided by his own copy of Pausanias, he pulled a gold funerary mask from a grave and decided on the spot it belonged to Agamemnon. He supposedly telegraphed that he had gazed upon the face of the king, a line that looks to be a later embellishment. The mask is real and truly magnificent, yet it predates any Agamemnon by some 300-400 years.

If you are based in Athens, you could potentially visit Mycenae and Epidaurus on one long but rewarding day trip. Buy your tickets to both online before heading off.

5. Delos, The Cyclades

A short boat ride from party-hard Mykonos lands you on Delos, its polar opposite in every way: windswept, uninhabited, and blissfully silent. The Greeks believed this was the birthplace of Apollo and his twin Artemis, which made it holy ground, and holy ground came with an abundance of rules. In 426 BC, Athens ordered the island purified, so every grave was dug up and bones shipped to a neighboring islet. From then on, no one was permitted to be born or to die on Delos. Expectant mothers and the dying were ferried off before either could happen.

The purity doubled as a cover for political control, and it did not stop Delos from later becoming a booming port and one of the ancient world’s biggest slave markets. What you can admire today is an entire open-air city of mosaic floors and roofless houses, watched over by the marble beasts of the Terrace of the Lions. The ones on site are copies, as most originals sit in the museum. And one, hauled off many moons ago, still guards the gate of the Venetian Arsenal.

Boats run from Mykonos most mornings, and you get a few hours on the island before the last one back. There is nowhere to stay the night, by ancient decree and modern practice alike. Head off on the first boat across because cruise line passengers and most other tourists coming from Mykonos don’t usually arrive before mid-morning. At the very least, you will have some peace for the first hour of your visit.

It is easy to look at a stunning Italian castle and see only the beauty of its frescoed halls and courtyards made for postcards (or Instagram). Yet, behind those impossibly thick walls, tragedy never roamed too far, and not only in the supposedly dark Middle Ages. This was the other side of the Italian Renaissance, where a marquis could behead his teenage wife for adultery, or a king could invite his rebellious barons to a feast and bolt the doors behind them. Because the Red Wedding had to come from somewhere.

1. Castello Estense, Ferrara

The Este family ran Ferrara for three centuries from this moated brick fortress, the same court that would later claim Lucrezia Borgia as its duchess. The beautiful Italian castle was the scene of many famous and infamous historical happenings, but is best known for the one about love and tragedy that played out in 1425. It was the year the reigning Marquis Niccolò III d’Este, after marrying the young Parisina Malatesta, discovered she’d been having an affair with his illegitimate son, Ugo, who was much closer to her in age. Enraged by the betrayal, even though his own affairs could be counted by the dozen, the Marquis reportedly had the young lovers beheaded in the cold dungeons beneath the Lion Tower.

Expect to spend at least two, if not three, hours here, exploring the seedy dungeon cells, the stunning halls with their priceless artworks, and leave time at the end to climb the tower for the most stunning views of Ferrara’s skyline.

2. Castel Nuovo, Naples

Naples’s great seaside fortress, which locals call the Maschio Angioino, earned its grandest room a sinister name. Through the mid-1480s, the kingdom’s barons plotted against Ferrante of Aragon, who was busy stripping away their feudal power. Rather than fight them in the field, Ferrante played host, inviting the leading conspirators to his niece’s wedding at the castle in 1486.

The barons, who clearly hadn’t seen the infamous Game of Thrones episode, happily joined the feasting, and once they had settled in, Ferrante had the doors bolted and the men arrested. The ringleaders were executed, and macabre rumors soon spread that Ferrante had their mummified bodies dressed in fine clothes and placed on display in a private chamber as a warning.

The room has been the Sala dei Baroni, the Hall of the Barons, ever since. It was meant as a lasting show of strength, though the control it advertised did not last long. When Charles VIII of France marched into Naples a few years later, the Aragonese grip Ferrante had fought (and killed) for fell apart.

3. Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome

Rome’s round fortress on the Tiber started life as Emperor Hadrian’s mausoleum and spent the Renaissance as a papal fortress and prison. Its most famous inmate was Beatrice Cenci, a young noblewoman who had plotted with her stepmother and brothers to have her abusive father, Francesco, murdered.

The plot faltered, and Pope Clement VIII refused every plea for mercy, possibly with one eye laser-focused on the flush Cenci estate, most of which duly passed to his own nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini, once the family was gone.

The executions in 1599 were staged on a scaffold on the bridge in front of the castle. Beatrice’s brother Giacomo was tortured on the way there, then killed with a mallet, and his body quartered, while Beatrice and her stepmother were beheaded with an axe. Only the youngest brother, 18-year-old Bernardo, was spared, made to watch the others die before being sent off to the galleys. The crowd was huge and openly on Beatrice‘s side, and very few locals accepted the verdict.

Climb to the top terrace, where Puccini set the last act of Tosca, and you get one of the best views in Rome.

4. Castello Sforzesco, Milan

Milan‘s enormous red-brick citadel was the seat of the Sforza dukes, and it grew up around one of the smoothest power grabs of the age. The rightful duke was young Gian Galeazzo Sforza, whose uncle Ludovico ruled in his place as regent and never quite got around to relinquishing power. When Gian Galeazzo died in 1494, conveniently clearing the path to the title, Milan whispered poison, though the young man’s lifelong ill health meant the conspiracy theory was only that.

Ludovico kept a dazzling court here and employed Leonardo da Vinci as everything from portraitist to party engineer. The clever plotting came at a price, though. To outflank his Italian rivals, il Moro invited the French across the Alps, and the invasion he set in motion eventually swallowed Milan in its entirety and left him to die a prisoner in France.

5. Castello di Carini, Sicily

High above the coast near Palermo, Castello di Carini is remembered for a single December night way back in 1563. Laura Lanza, the Baroness of Carini, had been married off at 14 and had taken a lover, Ludovico Vernagallo, who happened to be her husband’s cousin.

When word reached her father, Cesare Lanza, he rode to the castle, killed them both, and then wrote a strikingly calm letter to King Philip II of Spain confessing to the honor killing. He was promptly pardoned.

A famous Sicilian poem, the bitter tale of the Baroness of Carini, kept the story alive for centuries as the story of a tragically doomed romance. The less romantic reading, which several historians now prefer, is that Cesare owed Vernagallo money and stood to swallow his estate and reclaim his daughter’s dowry, and that “honor” was simply the cheapest cover. Interestingly, Italian law traditionally kept a softer sentence for honor killings until the early 1980s.

6. Castello Orsini-Odescalchi, Bracciano

This lakeside fortress north of Rome was the stronghold of the Orsini and the marital home, in theory, of Isabella de’ Medici, the brilliant and independent daughter of Cosimo I. Her husband, Paolo Giordano Orsini, spent most of the marriage in Rome with his own affairs, while gossip in Florence tied Isabella to his cousin Troilo.

She stayed safe as long as her powerful father lived, yet soon after he died, in July 1576, Paolo called her away on a hunting trip, and she turned up dead at one of the Medici’s villas in Tuscany (most likely Cerreto Guidi).

Her own brother put out that she had collapsed while washing her hair, but not many believed him. The Ferrarese ambassador reported she had been strangled, and chillingly, her cousin Leonora had died the same way at another villa just days earlier. A recent study of the couple’s letters has muddied the story even more, hinting she may have died of a long illness instead.

If there’s one thing that can be said about the crowds at the Vatican Museums, it is that they are delightfully predictable. Almost everyone moves en masse in the same direction, carried along a single slow current toward Michelangelo’s jaw-dropping ceiling.

Yet the walls they pass on the way hold some of the finest Renaissance masterpieces in Rome, and most are barely noticed. Side step that current and head into the quieter Pinacoteca to see artwork that carries stories even the headline attractions find difficult to match.

Here are five pieces worth seeking out.

1. The Painted Borgia Apartments Meant to Sell a Fake Bloodline

On the way up to the Raphael Rooms, most tour groups pour through several dimly lit rooms without slowing down, which suits the rooms’ history. These are the Borgia Apartments, the private quarters Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) had decorated with frescoes by Pinturicchio between 1492 and 1494, and they later fell out of regular use for centuries before becoming part of the museum complex.

The man who sealed them shut was Julius II, who disliked his Borgia predecessor so fiercely that he refused to live among his things and moved one floor up, into the rooms Raphael would later make famous. The Borgia frescoes have been the forgotten downstairs ever since, now sharing the space with the Vatican’s modern religious art.

The room you ought to hunt down is the Sala dei Santi, the Hall of Saints. The walls carry the expected lineup of martyrs, but the ceiling tells a far odder story, with the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris painted alongside the sacred bull Apis. None of that was a simple decorative whim. Alexander VI had allegedly relied on a theologian named Annio da Viterbo, a man with a well-earned reputation for forging ancient documents, to concoct a family tree tracing the Borgias back to the Egyptian gods. Apis happened to be a bull, and a bull happened to sit on the Borgia crest, so the ceiling appears less as mythology and more as a pope documenting his own divine pedigree. On the wall below, the young saint in the Disputation of Saint Catherine is widely thought to be Lucrezia Borgia, though this has never really been proven.

2. Leonardo’s Unfinished Saint Jerome

Of the five entries on this list, this may be the one you may already know, since it turns up on nearly every list of the Vatican’s quieter treasures. But it earns the repeat. The stunning piece hangs in Room IX of the Pinacoteca, just a short detour off the route most visitors take.

Leonardo da Vinci left this Saint Jerome unfinished, and after his death in 1519, the panel dropped out of the record for the better part of three centuries. When it resurfaced in 19th-century Rome, it had been sawed apart. The lower section had reportedly served as the lid of a box in a junk shop, while the piece bearing the saint’s head was found doing duty as the seat of a cobbler’s stool.

Cardinal Joseph Fesch, an uncle of Napoleon, hunted down the scattered fragments and had them rejoined, and the repair lines still run visibly across the surface. Accounts disagree on how many pieces it was cut into, somewhere between two and five, so the exact butchery stays fuzzy. Fesch treasured the reassembled panel for the rest of his life, reportedly hanging it above his favorite armchair. Soon after his death, the masterpiece was discovered in a pawnshop in Rome and promptly rescued by the Vatican.

3. Raphael’s Tapestries Intended as Wall Art for the Sistine Chapel

Most people picture the Sistine Chapel as Michelangelo’s ceiling and little else, but it was meant to be seen with a set of woven hangings on the lower walls, and those were designed by his great rival. Around 1515, Raphael drew full-scale cartoons for a series of tapestries showing scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, made to hang beneath the ceiling on feast days.

The designs went to Brussels to be woven in wool, silk, and gold thread, an enormously costly commission. Then came the 1527 Sack of Rome, when mutinous imperial troops looted the city, and the tapestries were scattered and damaged.

Of the ten original tapestries, most were eventually recovered. The Vatican still owns them, and you can see them in rotation in the aptly named Gallery of Tapestries. But it’s interesting to know that the room nearly everyone comes to photograph is, strictly speaking, only half-dressed. The cartoons Raphael drew for them ended up in London’s V&A, where they are treated as masterpieces in their own right.

4. Melozzo da Forlì’s Angels Rescued From a Demolished Apse

Around 1480, Melozzo da Forlì covered the apse of the church of Santi Apostoli with a soaring Ascension of Christ, the kind of dramatic upward-looking perspective that later caught the eye of Michelangelo. The fresco survived for roughly two centuries. Then, in 1711, the church was rebuilt, and the old apse came down, and the painting with it.

Rather than lose the work outright, restorers cut what they could from the wall in sections. That is why the figures now hang as separate fragments, the calm musician angels and watching apostles in the Vatican Pinacoteca, and the central figure of Christ over in the Quirinal Palace on the other side of the city.

What looks like a gallery of individual heads is really the wreckage of one enormous scene, salvaged in panels. Even the patron is uncertain now, with names ranging from Cardinal Bessarion to the future Pope Julius II attached to the commission over the years.

5. A Painted Celestial Globe That the Vatican Long Credited to the Wrong Man

On the way toward the exit, in the old library wing, sits a large painted wooden globe from 1567, mapping the heavens as the ancient astronomer Ptolemy understood them, with the constellations drawn as the mythological figures they were named after. For a long stretch, the Vatican credited the work to Giulio Romano, Raphael’s most gifted pupil, a famous name to attach to a beautiful object. That attribution appears to have grown out of a misread line in Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer whose word was often taken as gospel.

The globe is now widely credited instead to Giovanni Antonio Vanosino, a specialist Renaissance mapmaker who helped decorate grand rooms such as the Vatican’s own hall of maps. He was never a household name by any means, which is probably the point.

The piece sat for centuries under a borrowed reputation, admired as the work of someone who, as far as we can tell, never even touched it.

Museums play a vital role in preserving history and educating the public about people, places, animals, art, and artifacts from all around the world. While there are museums in just about every major city across the globe, some are vast institutions that you could spend days wandering through, poring over the depth and diversity of their collections. Join us as we explore the world’s largest museums based on factors such as footprint, collection, and visitor numbers.

You can also explore our lists of must-visit History and Art museums, or find out which are the most visited museums in the world.

1. The Louvre Is the Largest Museum in the World

Of all the museums in the world, the Louvre in Paris is the largest by gallery space, covering more than 780,000 square feet, while the full complex is 2.3 million square feet. The museum was once a medieval fortress and the home to French kings before being converted into a vast Parisian Museum. It was opened to the public during the French Revolution in 1793 with just 537 paintings, many of which had been confiscated from the royal family and church during the Revolution.

In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand launched the “Grand Louvre” renovation project and commissioned Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei to design a new central entrance. Unveiled in 1989, the striking modern Glass Pyramid stirred significant public debate before becoming an internationally recognized architectural landmark.

The Louvre is home to some of the most important art and artifacts in the history of human civilization, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and Eugène Delacroix’s iconic masterpiece Liberty Leading the People. Because of its incredible scale, you could literally spend days wandering through the Louvre, which is why so many people come back again and again to take in more.

2. The Smithsonian Institution Is the Largest Museum Complex

The Smithsonian Institution is the largest complex of museums in the world, with 21 different galleries and museums spread across the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African Art, and the National Air and Space Museum. Together they hold more than 155 million items and specimens, less than 1% of which are on display.

The Smithsonian also runs a large zoological park, containing a long A to Z of animals from the tiniest insects to the largest mammals. And, alongside these sites, there are eight different research stations where diverse fields are explored, including marine biology, astrophysics, environmental research, and American art.

The collections include many icons of American history, including the Star-Spangled Banner (the actual flag that inspired the national flag), the Apollo 11 Command Module, Dorothy’s ruby slipper from The Wizard of Oz, and the legendary Hope Diamond. It also has the only Leonardo da Vinci painting on public display in the Americas, Ginevra de’ Benci.

3. Russia’s State Hermitage Museum Has the Largest Collection of Paintings 

While other museums have achieved record-breaking scale and floor space, the State Hermitage Museum in Russia currently houses the largest collection of any single museum in the entire world. They own more than three million artifacts that date from the Stone Age to the early 20th century.

Once the home of Russian Tsars, this impressive stretch of six buildings running along the river Neva was converted into a court museum in 1764 by Catherine the Great to house her impressive collection of paintings. One of the museum’s star attractions is its Gold Rooms, showcasing priceless gold masterpieces from Eurasia, the Orient, and the Black Sea Littoral. They also own masterpieces by Western artists, including Rubens, Titian, Goya, Picasso, and Van Gogh. It is estimated that if you looked at everything for just one minute, it would take 11 years to see the full collection.

Since the 18th century, the museum has maintained an official resident population of around 50 to 70 cats to guard the vaults and galleries against rodents. Empress Elizabeth ordered the first cats from Kazan in 1745, and today they even have their own press secretary, medical staff, and annual celebration day.

4. The National Museum of China Is the Largest Single-Building Museum 

The National Museum of China, located on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, holds the record as the largest single museum building in the world. Formed in 2003 through the merger of the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, it now stands as one of the most important cultural institutions in Asia.

Inside its 48 exhibition halls, visitors can explore more than 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, from Neolithic jade carvings to Qing dynasty relics. The halls are structured around a central forum 260 meters long. There is also a subterranean level that houses the primary permanent collection, showcasing 5,000 years of dynastic relics, including the famous Shang bronzes and Han dynasty jade suits.

Upper gallery floors feature themed galleries dedicated to subjects such as calligraphy, classical furniture, and diplomatic gifts. With its sheer scale and unrivaled collection of Chinese cultural treasures, the museum continues to draw millions of visitors each year.

5. The Grand Egyptian Museum Is the Largest Museum for a Single Civilization

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Giza is the largest museum in the world devoted to a single civilization. Situated just two kilometers from the Giza Pyramid Complex, the GEM represents a monumental investment in preserving Egypt’s heritage. Construction began in 2005 and was completed in 2023 for $1 billion, with the museum’s grand opening in November 2025.

The museum displays the complete collection of Tutankhamun’s treasures for the first time, alongside colossal statues and artifacts spanning Egypt’s 5,000-year history. Other highlights include the 110-ton pink granite obelisk of Ramesses II, mounted on an elevated pedestal at the entrance, and a colossal 11-meter-tall statue of Ramesses II in the Grand Hall. There is also Khufu’s solar boat, originally buried next to his pyramid to carry him into the afterlife. The Grand Staircase is lined with 60 colossal statues, sarcophagi, and architectural elements from pharaonic history.

The GEM is designed not only as an exhibition space but also as a major research and conservation center, redefining how the world engages with ancient Egyptian culture.

6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Is the Largest Museum in the Americas 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest museum in the Americas. While its gallery space is smaller than the Louvre, at 630,000 square feet, the Met’s total floor area stretches to an extraordinary 2.2 million square feet, making it the most expansive museum in the Western Hemisphere.

Opened in 1870, the Metropolitan Museum’s aim was “to bring art and art education to the American people.” Since this time, it has more than fulfilled its role, housing an impressive array of around 50,000 different objects spanning more than 5,000 years of human history. These range from the columns of ancient Greek temples to indigenous African wood carvings, along with Canova’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1804-6, and John Singer Sargent’s infamous Madame X, 1883-84.

For fashion lovers, the museum houses the Anna Wintour Costume Institute, which holds over 33,000 historic and modern garments. The annual Met Gala, held on the first Monday in May, serves as the primary fundraiser for the department and is one of the fashion world’s most high-profile red carpet events.

7. The Vatican Museums Display Centuries of Papal Collecting

The Vatican Museums in Vatican City are an extraordinary public art complex displaying treasures assembled by the Roman Catholic Church and successive popes over more than 500 years. If you follow the official visitor route through the various interconnected corridors, wings, and courtyards, you will cover a distance of around seven kilometers, or over four miles. The interior exhibition space covers over 43,000 m² (460,000 sq ft) across 54 distinct galleries and 1,400 individual rooms and chapels.

There are several distinct museums within the complex, including the Pio-Clementino Museum of classical Greek and Roman sculpture, where you can see Laocoön and His Sons; the Gregorian Egyptian and Etruscan Museum; the Raphael Rooms, which are four monumental papal suites painted by the Renaissance master; and the Sistine Chapel, famously decorated by Michelangelo. There is also the Vatican Historical Museum and Carriage Pavilion, with historic papal carriages and cars.

The collection ranges from ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and classical Greco-Roman statuary to High Renaissance masterpieces, contemporary religious art, and global ethnographic collections. This makes it a pilgrimage site for art and history lovers alongside the faithful.

8. Tokyo National Museum Houses Imperial Treasures of East Asia

The Tokyo National Museum, located inside Ueno Park in Tokyo, is Japan’s oldest national museum. Established in 1872, it combines an expansive architectural complex with a collection of extraordinary cultural significance. While 120,000 objects might seem modest when compared with some other museums on this list, they cover Japanese history from prehistoric times to the modern era, and there are also artifacts from across the Silk Road. This includes 10% of all designated national treasures in Japan.

It is a multi-building complex in Ueno Park. The Honkan main gallery was built in 1938 and houses prehistoric Japanese pottery, samurai armor, ukiyo-e prints, and Buddhist sculpture. The Toyokan is a five-floor gallery dedicated to Asian art. The Heiseikan delivers archaeology collections and special exhibitions. The Gallery of Horyuji Treasures is a modern gallery showing religious artifacts donated by the ancient Hōryū-ji temple in Nara.

Collection highlights include the Prehistoric Dogū & Haniwa, intricate terracotta figurines from the prehistoric period, samurai swords and armor, woodblock prints by old masters, and gilt bronze Buddhist statues.

9. Museo Nacional de Antropología Celebrates Indigenous Mexico

The Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology) in Mexico City is Mexico’s most visited museum and widely regarded as one of the most important anthropology and archaeology museums in the world. Located within Chapultepec Park, it houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of pre-Columbian Mexican art and heritage.

The museum complex is enormous, covering around 915,000 square feet, including 23 permanent exhibition halls connected by a vast central courtyard. Many halls open directly into outdoor gardens containing reconstructed ancient monuments and ruins.

The museum holds more than 600,000 artifacts, including treasures such as an Aztec Sun Stone used for cosmology and to measure calendar cycles; Olmec colossal heads; the reconstructed tomb of the Maya ruler Pakal the Great; and a replica of Moctezuma’s elaborate feather crown (the original Penacho is housed at the Weltmuseum Wien in Austria)

10. British Museum Holds Eight Million Objects of Global Cultural Heritage

The British Museum in London is the world’s first national public museum, established in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. Dedicated to human history, art, and culture, it chronicles the story of human civilization from its earliest beginnings to the modern day. Initially holding just 71,000 objects, it expanded quickly, so much so that collections had to break away to form independent institutions, including the Natural History Museum (1881) and the British Library (1973). Today it has over eight million objects and almost one million square feet of display space.

Collection highlights include the Rosetta Stone, a stele carved with Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Ancient Greek text, unlocking the translation of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. There are also the controversial Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon in Athens. There is the treasure of the Sutton Hoo ship burial.

The museum also holds extensive collections covering Egypt and the Sudan; Greece and Rome; the Middle East; Britain and Europe; Asia; Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; Prints and Drawings; and Coins and Medals. Only about 1% of the collection is on public display.

Oxford is often referred to as a living open-air museum, as the history of the university town is on display through its 1,000 years of architecture. Settled by the Saxons in the 8th century AD, the city became a center of learning starting around the 11th century. Since then, successive generations of intellectuals and architects have consciously left their mark on the city’s skyline, known as the Dreaming Spires because of the number of medieval, Gothic, and romantic buildings dotting the skyline. If your time in Oxford is short, but you want to discover the highlights of its architectural history, these are your ten must-visit places. You will discover Saxon towers, Norman crypts, medieval churches, Victorian innovations, and modern imagination.

1. St. Michael at the North Gate (c. 1040)

11th-century Saxon Utility (Corner of Cornmarket and Ship Street)

St. Michael at the North Gate is the oldest building still standing in Oxford. The Anglo-Saxon tower was built between 1000 and 1050 AD as a lookout post over the ramparts as part of the city’s original northern defenses. At the time, the locals were worried about Viking attacks. In 1002 AD, the Anglo-Saxon king massacred a group of Danes inside the city as part of the St Brice’s Day Massacre.

Standing 63 feet high, with 97 steps up for visitors, the tower is characterized by the characteristic Anglo-Saxon “long and short” stonework, with coral rag rubble stone pieced together erratically with larger and smaller pieces mixed. The walls are four feet thick, and there is evidence of blocked-up arches and windows. The tower is a prime example of pre-conquest architecture, which tends to be functional and sturdy rather than ornate.

While a Saxon church may have already stood on the site, a new church was built there and attached to the tower in the 13th century. The church today still contains some of the earliest surviving stained glass in the city, featuring St. Nicholas, St. Edmund of Abingdon, St. Michael, and the Virgin and Child.

The Oxford Martyrs, Protestants tried for heresy in 1555, were burnt at the stake nearby on Broad Street. Their cell door is now on display in the church tower. The church also holds some of the country’s oldest church warden accounts, dating back to the 15th century.

2. Oxford Castle and Prison (c. 1071)

11th-century Norman Might, overlaid by 900 years of construction (Oxford Castle Quarter, between New Road and Paradise Street)

Now one of Oxford’s nicest hotels, Oxford Castle was originally built by a friend of William the Conqueror, the Norman baron Robert D’Oyly, between 1071 and 1073. Oxford had been stormed during the invasion, and D’Oyly constructed the Norman castle to dominate the surrounding region, which William had entrusted to him. His holdings are mentioned in the Doomsday Book as “meadow 30 acres, one mill, value ten shillings.” This is presumably the Castle Mill, which was only demolished in 1930.

Like St. Michael’s, the castle formed part of Oxford’s defenses. St George’s Tower, which was probably originally Saxon, was incorporated into the Norman structure. The original castle probably also had a motte and bailey. We can only say probably because, by the early 13th century, the original wooden keep was replaced by a ten-sided stone shell keep. St George’s Crypt is a Norman underground structure, probably built by D’Oyly, which was restored in the 18th century.

In 1074, St George’s Chapel was built as part of the complex. It was the first collegiate church inside a castle and served scholars such as the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth, one of our earliest sources of King Arthur. This chapel is believed to be the seed from which Oxford University grew.

The castle played a role in the Anarchy, when Robert D’Oyly the younger, the architect’s nephew, declared for Matilda, and she marched her forces to Oxford as her new base in 1141. But Stephen quickly took Oxford and besieged Matilda in the castle tower. In December 1142, Matilda escaped from the castle, apparently dressing in white to camouflage herself with the snow.

In the middle of the 13th century, King Henry III turned the castle into a prison, especially for troublesome university clerks, as Oxford was a major university town from at least the 12th century. The Royalists chose Oxford as their capital during the English Civil War in the mid-17th century. After the war, this made Oxford Castle the perfect setting for a prison again. Hundreds of people were hanged on the gallows over the centuries. More modern facilities were constructed at the end of the 18th century, and the castle served as an active prison until 1986.

In 1996, Oxford Castle and Prison was converted into a multi-use site with a hotel, restaurants, bars, and a historic visitor center. Prison cells were converted into hotel rooms, and visitors can explore the 900-year-old Norman crypt and hear the site’s many ghost stories.

3. Christ Church Cathedral (12th Century)

A Blend of Late Romanesque to Gothic Styles (St Aldate’s, through Tom Tower and the Christchurch Quad)

Inside one of Oxford’s most splendid colleges, the cathedral predates the college itself. It was built in the 12th century as a cathedral for the diocese of Oxford and later became the college chapel. This dual role is unique within the Church of England.

The site was initially a nunnery and parish church, probably founded in the 8th century, burnt with Danes inside during the St Brice’s Day massacre in 1002 AD. It was re-established in 1122. The first parts constructed were the Augustinian Priory and the Shrine of St Frideswide, both dating to the 12th century and constructed in Norman Romanesque style. The Becket Window in the Lucy Chapel dates to 1320 and is one of the few images of Thomas Becket to survive the Reformation.

The cathedral’s iconic perpendicular Gothic pendant vault was constructed in the 15th century. It uses a two-tiered arch system that gives the impression of increased height, which is rarely seen in England.

The building was modified again in the early 16th century when Cardinal Wolsey started constructing his college around the cathedral. He initially planned to demolish the cathedral, but it was saved by Henry VIII, though significantly diminished in size. The cathedral was then left to fall into decay, but underwent major restoration in 1870.

Other painted glass windows were installed in the 1630s and the Victorian era, including the St Frideswide window designed by the famous pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. The cathedral has had an active choir continuously since 1526.

4. Merton College Chapel (1290s)

Decorated Gothic with Geometric Tracery (Corner of Merton Street and Grove Walk)

In 1266, the Church of St John the Baptist in Oxford was granted to Merton College as their new college church. However, records suggest that by the 1280s, the church had fallen into decay. Construction of a new church began in 1290. Many features of this church have survived until the modern day.

Original features include the choir (the seating area for the clergy and choir) and the east windows. These windows feature early Geometric tracery, which marks a shift from the lancet style of the Early English period that was happening exactly in this decade. They feature scenes of the Annunciation with the Angel Gabriel meeting the Virgin Mary.

Other parts of the church, including the central tower and lectern, were built in the 14th and 15th centuries. The church was then hit hard by the austerity of the Reformation, and most of the stained glass was hidden or removed. Some of the glass and wall paintings were saved by being boarded over and whitewashed. Even traditional service books, vestments, furnishing, and other features were removed, considered offensive to the new religion. This meant that the church was in poor condition by the 17th century, when restoration was led by Christopher Wren.

In 1967, the chapel celebrated a Roman Catholic Mass again, for the first time since the Reformation. Since then, the chapel has been rejuvenated, with installations such as a fine chapel organ.

5. The Divinity School (1488)

Perpendicular Gothic Perfection (Broad Street, Old Bodleian Library)

Built in the 15th century as part of the Bodleian Library, the Divinity School was the university’s first dedicated teaching and exam space. It also served as parliament several times, for example, hosting the House of Commons when London was overrun by plague in 1625, and the Royalist parliament of Charles I during the English Civil War. It is no longer a teaching space, but an event and tour space for the library.

The open space is built in Perpendicular style with a very elaborate lierne vaulted ceiling featuring 455 bosses designed by William Orchard. The ceiling is considered a masterpiece of late Gothic architecture with lace-like stone ribs that seem to defy gravity, hanging in a heavenly stone canopy. The carved bosses depict scenes from the Bible, crests of patrons and benefactors, and mythical beasts.

At the eastern end of the room, you can see pulpits where students and tutors once stood during debates. There is also a wooden armchair carved from the wood of Sir Francis Drake’s ship. There is also a chest that belonged to Sir Thomas Bodley, the patron of the Bodleian Library.

Today, the Divinity School is famous as a set in the Harry Potter films, serving as the infirmary, and where Professor McGonagall taught the students to dance for the Triwizard Cup’s Yule Ball.

6. The Bodleian Library and Old Schools Quad (1613–1624)

Jacobean Renaissance Teaching Space (Corner of Catte Street and Broad Street)

The Bodleian Library was founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602 as the university’s main research library. It was built on an older library established in the 14th century, known as the Duke Humfrey’s Library, and the Bodleian occupied its buildings. You can still visit this original section where the books are chained to the tables to prevent theft.

The Bodleian is now the second-largest library in Britain, behind the British Library, thanks to a 1610 agreement with the Stationers’ Company to provide the library with copies of every book published in England. This was later replaced by the Legal Deposit Act, which is still in force today.

The Old Schools Quad was built as an extension of the library, starting in 1613, in Jacobean architectural style with some traditional Gothic elements. Three wings were added to the existing Proscholium to form a quadrangle. Its tower forms the main entrance to the library and is known as the Tower of the Five Orders because it is ornamented with columns from each of the five orders of classical architecture: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. They are stacked vertically in order as a teaching tool.

The wings were originally used as lecture spaces, and the subjects covered are still indicated on the inscriptions over the doors. They include moral and natural philosophy, law, medicine, rhetoric, logic, and music.

7. The Sheldonian Theatre (1664)

Christopher Wren’s Baroque Masterpiece (Broad Street, Old Bodleian Library)

The Sheldonian Theater was built between 1664 and 1669 based on a design by the renowned architect Christopher Wren, then a professor of astronomy at Oxford. He remains one of England’s most highly acclaimed architects, especially known for his Baroque style. He was responsible for rebuilding more than 50 churches in London after the Great Fire of 1666, including St Paul’s Cathedral.

But before that, he built the Sheldonian Theater for Oxford University, named after its main financial benefactor, Gilbert Sheldon, then the Warden of All Souls College and the Chancellor of the university. He wanted a place to host graduation and degree ceremonies, infamously rowdy events that seemed inappropriate in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, where they were held at the time.

Wren reportedly based his design on 16th-century drawings of the D-shaped Theater of Marcellus, built in Rome in the 1st century BC. The main difference was that he replaced the Roman theater’s temporary awnings with a permanent roof suitable for rainy England. This was a challenge, as the roof was over 70 feet across, and no timbers of sufficient size were available.

As a solution, Wren designed a series of trusses that were built up in shorter sections and then held in place by their own weight. This was highly innovative at the time and earned Wren significant credit in architectural circles, paving the way for his future fame. The roof is surmounted by a prominent eight-sided cupola that has large windows, offering stunning views over central Oxford.

Internally, the ceiling was decorated with 32 oil-on-canvas panels painted by Robert Streater that show an allegorical story of Truth descending upon the Arts and Sciences and expelling ignorance from the university. This was meant to give the illusion from below that the theatre was open to the sky. The decoration also includes Roman symbols, such as the fasces, an axe in a bundle of rods that was a sign of political power in the Roman world.

The theater is still used for matriculation and graduation ceremonies, and it also hosts music recitals, lectures, and conferences. It is also the regular meeting place of Congregation, the body that governs the university.

8. The Radcliffe Camera (1737–1749)

English Palladianism and Baroque (Radcliffe Square, Corner of Catte Street and Brasenose Lane)

The Radcliffe Camera is an ornate circular Palladian and Baroque structure built by James Gibbs to house the university’s science library collections. Because of the building’s central location, round design, and the fact that it is one of the few buildings that sits separate from others, it has become one of the most iconic symbols of the university. It is considered a Neo-Classical jewel in Oxford’s strong architectural landscape.

The library was posthumously funded by John Radcliffe, an Oxford alumnus with a successful medical career, even attending William III and Queen Anne. He had been making plans for a library in the years before his death in 1714. Even with Radcliffe’s fortune, it took several years and an act of parliament, the Radcliffe Camera Act of 1720, to acquire the necessary land. After several preferred architects, such as Christopher Wren, died, they hired Gibbs to do the job.

The result was a 140-foot round structure that is considered one of the best examples of English Baroque architecture. There were plenty of issues along the way. For example, Gibbs intended for the dome of the reading room to be made of stone, but it was abandoned after significant stone work had already been done. The roof was ultimately constructed in timber with plaster coffering to make it look like stone.

The internal design started after the external structure was complete. Stonemasonry rather than traditional plaster was used, showcasing exceptional craftsmanship. This part of the process also faced its fair share of challenges. Part of this was because the university’s Trustees ensured that no work proceeded by candlelight. This was because, since around 1600, users of Oxford’s libraries must swear an oath of admission that they will not damage books, including promising not to bring fire or flame into the library. The oath is still sworn today.

9. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History (1860)

Neo-Gothic Revival and Cathedral of Science (Parks Road)

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History is one of the most important science museums in the world. It holds unique artifacts, such as the remains of a dodo bird, made famous by the works of Charles Darwin. The museum’s construction was spearheaded by Henry Acland to create a space dedicated to teaching science within the university. It was envisioned as a cathedral of science. The museum contains the statues of 19 great scientists dotted around the court, including Aristotle, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Linnaeus.

The building itself is considered a striking example of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture and is particularly noted for its glass and iron roof, akin to that of the Crystal Palace in London. It took two attempts to get the design right. When the first roof was almost complete, it had to be scrapped as it could not hold its own weight. It was replaced with the cast iron columns with wrought iron work seen in the museum today.

The museum’s design owed much to the ideas of the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin, who believed that architecture should be shaped by the energies of the natural world. As such, the museum’s decoration, also inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, reproduces elements from the natural world, both as decoration and a teaching tool. The court’s 126 columns are each made from different British decorative rock, labelled with the stone and its source. The capitals and corbels are carved into plants representing all the botanical orders. The ironwork spandrels represent the branches of trees, including species such as sycamore, walnut, and palm.

Shortly after opening in 1860, the museum hosted the great debate on evolution. While inspired by Darwin’s work, the debate was between biologist Thomas Huxley and bishop Samuel Wilberforce.

10. St. Catherine’s College (1962)

Danish Modernism and Green Space (Manor Road)

While Oxford is known for its historic buildings, it is also home to modern architectural achievements. St Catherine’s College was built in 1962 by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen. He wanted to design a modern solution for a modern world that integrated aesthetically pleasing and functional architecture into the natural environment. He considered every element, not just the buildings themselves, but also designed the cutlery, furniture, and even the lampshades.

He stuck with Oxford’s classic rectangular quadrangle design used by most colleges, but rather than stone, constructed his buildings from glass and concrete. But unlike most Oxford quads, it is not closed off. Instead, hedge-lined walks lead to other buildings and to garden areas, creating a very green space. The gardens are now Grade I listed, just like many of Oxford’s buildings. Though unlike buildings, plants cannot be static, so the listing refers more to the spirit of the design than the exact plants.