Palace of Versailles

Versailles nearly did not survive the monarchy that built it. After the Revolution emptied the palace of Louis XIV, there was talk of demolishing it, until King Louis-Philippe stepped in during the 1830s and turned the whole thing into a museum to all the glories of France. He filled the royal apartments with history paintings of French battles and heroes, and that is the institution that opened in 1837 and still runs today.

So a visit is really two things at once. There is the palace as theatre of power, above all the Hall of Mirrors, a 73-metre gallery of arched mirrors and chandeliers where the court once processed and where, in 1919, the treaty ending the First World War was signed.

And there is Louis-Philippe's museum layered over it, most spectacularly the Gallery of Battles, a long hall he built along the south wing lined with thirty huge canvases marching from Clovis to Napoleon. Outside, the gardens of Andre Le Notre still run in straight lines to the horizon, cut and planted as they were in the 1660s.