Beaux-Arts de Paris

For two centuries almost every ambitious French painter and architect passed through this school on the Left Bank, the École des Beaux-Arts. To win its Prix de Rome, a young artist competed under lock and key for weeks, and the prize was years of study in Italy at the state's expense.

The school kept the winning works, along with drawings, paintings and architectural fragments used to teach, and over time this became a real museum collection: sheets by Michelangelo, Poussin, Ingres and Delacroix, held in one of the great study collections of drawings in France.

Its courtyards are studded with plaster casts and salvaged pieces of French buildings, and the old Chapelle des Petits-Augustins still holds fragments gathered during the Revolution to protect them, when this site served as a depot for statues stripped from churches and royal tombs.