Petit Palais

The Petit Palais was built to last only as long as a party. It went up for the Paris World's Fair of 1900, one of a pair of grand exhibition halls thrown up along a new avenue, designed by the architect Charles Girault with a domed entrance and a curved colonnade around a hidden garden.

When the fair ended, the city kept it and turned it into its own fine-arts museum, which it remains. The permanent collection is free to enter. It ranges widely, from ancient and medieval objects to Dutch and Flemish painting, and on to Courbet, the Impressionists and a great sweep of 19th-century French art.

Much of the strength came from private gifts, above all the collection of the brothers Auguste and Eugene Dutuit, rich collectors who left the city their Rembrandt etchings, old master drawings and antiquities. The building is worth circling for its own sake, out to the semicircular garden at its centre, where a cafe sits under palms and mosaics beneath the great glass roof.