Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon

For centuries this was a Benedictine abbey in the middle of Lyon, home to a community of aristocratic nuns. When the Revolution dissolved it in the 1790s, the elegant 17th-century cloister and its halls were handed to the city, and within a decade they held a museum, seeded with 110 paintings sent down from the Louvre.

Two hundred years of collecting have made it one of the largest art museums in France outside Paris. You can cross five thousand years in a single visit, from Egyptian antiquities and a cabinet of coins to a wing of Rubens, Rembrandt and Zurbarán, and on to Monet and a room of modern art. The old cloister garden survives at the center, planted and quiet, a place to sit between the galleries.