#7! And Best Museums

Steph and Craig's #7 European Tourist Site is ...

Le Mont St. Michel, France. This monastery and town are built on a rock in a bay between Normandy and Brittany in northern France. For a great experience, arrive at night and tour the monastery the next morning. (This helps avoid the worst tourist crowds.) The town is incredibly preserved, down to minute details (like roof shingles) and the monastery has, in our opinions, the most spectacular cloister in Europe.

List o' the day: Top Ten Museums in Europe

Disclaimer! We didn't spend a lot of time visiting museums, so this list is limited greatly by which museums we decided to visit!

1. The Louvre, Paris, France
   No surprise here. Although I guess were were a little surprised that we could still be impressed by the Louvre after all of the hype. With its important and enormous collection and its elegant buildings (worth the price of admission alone!) the Louvre easily takes our number one pick.


2. The Vatican Museum, Vatican City (Rome), Italy
   Like the Louvre, it really would take multiple days to explore this collection. Most people head straight for the sistine chapel, but the Vatican museum also has impressive collections of medieval religious art and paleo-christian sarcophagi.


3. The Uffizi, Florence, Italy
   The Uffizi is so full of high wow-factor paintings, like Botticelli's Birth of Venus that is can be easy to overlook the rest of its collection. Particularly nice are the galleries illustrating the evolution of Italian painting before the Renaissance.


4. The National Archeological Museum, Athens, Greece
   This museum has the greatest collection in the world of Greek art, the sculpture is beautifully displayed, and is a great place to escape the Athens heat for hours on end.


5. The Capitolini Museum, Rome, Italy
   The museum is housed in a Renaissance palace overlooking the Roman Forum and highlights exquisite sculpture, as well as archeological findings from the Temple of Juno unearthed during its expansion.


6. The Judisches Museum, Berlin, Germany
   This modern museum presents Jewish history in Europe. The design and architecture of the interior, exterior and (many interactive) exhibits work conceptually with the subject matter. The best example of integrated museum design I've ever seen!


7. The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
   Frank Gehry's building is a piece of art in itself that works extraordinarily well on the Bilbao riverfront. Inside, there are several knockout art pieces in the permanent collection.


8. The Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark
   This museum is built around five viking ships found under the mud near Roskilde. The ships are impressive, but the museum's strong point are its live displays of viking maritime techniques and technology, like rope making and boat building.


9. The Historial de la Grande Guerre, Peronne, France
   This World War I museum does an amazing job of presenting nine viewpoints throughout the events of the war -- those of the military generals, the soldiers and the civilians, in Germany, France and Great Britain. (And in German, French and English.) A moving experience.


10. The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
    The Kunsthistoriches' painting collection is impressive, with Durer, Van Eyck, and a ton of Rubens, and some complete surprises (like the small paintings by Arcimboldo). They've also got a great collection of Bruegel paintings. And all of it is housed in a typical Viennese-style fancy building.

Honorable Mentions
There are a few individual objects that are worth seeing, even if the museums that house them do not make our list. These are:

• Michelangelo's David, at the Academia in Florence, Italy


• The Bayeux Tapestry, at the museum built to hold it in Bayeux, France


• A minutely detailed Model of the City of Prague made out of paper(!) at the City of Prague Museum in Prague, Czech Republic


• A fantastic Mechanical Boat with dozens of mechanically animated figures playing music and ending with a blast of the ship's cannon, at the National Museum of the Renaissance in Ecouen, France.