Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

Under a great glass dome in the heart of this Copenhagen museum is a winter garden of palm trees, and it is where the whole place began. Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of the Carlsberg brewery, kept adding sculpture to the conservatory of his own villa until the statues crowded out the plants, and in the 1880s he gave the overflowing collection to the city and state.

The museum that grew from it, opened in 1897, holds Scandinavia's largest collection of ancient art, Egyptian mummies, Etruscan bronzes, rank after rank of Roman portrait busts. Jacobsen also loved modern French sculpture and bought deeply: one of the great collections of Rodin outside France, and a complete set of Edgar Degas's bronzes, including the "Little Dancer of Fourteen." The palm garden is still there at the center, café tables set out under the fronds.