Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen

In the summer of 1944 the fighting for Caen after D-Day flattened much of the medieval town, and the old fine-arts museum went with it. The collection had been evacuated and survived. The building did not. When Caen rebuilt, it made an unusual choice about where to put the art back, inside the ramparts of the castle William the Conqueror raised in the 11th century, high above the town.

The purpose-built museum that opened there in 1971 holds a collection stronger than the city's size suggests, much of it French state deposits and old seizures. You come across Perugino, Veronese, Poussin and Rubens, and a deep gallery of 17th-century painting.

Walking in means crossing a Norman fortress first, past stone walls a thousand years old, before you reach the galleries, the modern museum set down where the castle's great medieval buildings once stood.