Germanisches Nationalmuseum

When Hans von und zu Aufsess, a Franconian baron with a passion for the medieval past, founded this museum in 1852, Germany did not yet exist as a country. His idea was to gather the whole material record of German-speaking culture under one roof before it scattered, and the result grew into the largest museum of its kind, spanning prehistory to the 20th century.

The collection is enormous, but a few things pull visitors across it. There is a deep holding of Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg's own painter and printmaker. And there is the Behaim globe, made in the city in 1492 by the merchant Martin Behaim, the oldest surviving globe of the Earth, its surface showing a world with no Americas on it because news of them had not yet arrived.

You reach the entrance along the Street of Human Rights, a row of white pillars by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan, each carved with an article of the Universal Declaration in a different language. It was installed in 1993, a deliberate answer to what Nuremberg's name had come to mean in the 20th century.