Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg

When Prussian guns shelled Strasbourg in the summer of 1870, they burned the city's art museum along with its paintings. What hangs in the Palais Rohan today is largely a second collection, rebuilt after the war under Wilhelm von Bode, the director of Berlin's museums, who steered Italian and Flemish primitives toward the recovering city.

The palace itself was built in the 1730s for the Rohan cardinals who ran the Strasbourg diocese like princes. Inside, the fine-arts galleries walk from Giotto and Memling through the Renaissance, with a Botticelli, a Raphael and El Greco's tormented saints, on to Rubens, Goya and Canaletto's Venice.

The picture visitors linger over is local: Nicolas de Largilliere's Belle Strasbourgeoise, a young woman from 1703 in an enormous black hat, painted with the confidence of a Paris portraitist showing off in the provinces.