Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

In the basement of this Lille museum sits something a picture gallery rarely keeps: a set of large scale models of fortified cities, built for Louis XIV's war ministry so the king could study his frontier towns without leaving Versailles. Lille's own model is among them, its star-shaped ramparts laid out street by street.

Upstairs is one of the richest art collections in France after the Louvre, housed in a grand brick-and-stone palace put up for it in the 1890s. The walls run from Flemish and Dutch masters, Rubens and Van Dyck, to a pair of dark, biting Goyas of old and young women, and on to Delacroix and the sculptor Rodin. It is a big-city museum in a place that was, for centuries, a fortress town on a much-contested border.