Israel Museum

On a Jerusalem hilltop the roof of one building looks like the white lid of a jar, set across a pool from a black basalt wall. The shape is deliberate: the lids of the jars in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the Qumran caves gave the architects, Armand Bartos and Frederick Kiesler, their form for this Shrine of the Book. Inside are some of the oldest known biblical manuscripts.

That shrine is one wing of the Israel Museum, the country's largest cultural institution, founded in 1965. Beside it stretches the Holyland Model, a huge open-air reconstruction of Jerusalem as it stood before the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, so you can walk around the city of the first century.

The rest ranges from archaeology to Old Masters and modern art, with an outdoor sculpture garden laid out by the artist Isamu Noguchi.