Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Brussels keeps its national art collection across a cluster of linked museums on the hill above the old town, and it runs from the 15th century to the present. The heart of it is Flemish: Rogier van der Weyden, Memling, a Bosch, and the finest gathering of Pieter Bruegel the Elder outside Vienna, including his snowy Census at Bethlehem and The Fall of the Rebel Angels, a swarming pile-up of monsters tumbling out of heaven.

One floor holds Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat, the murdered French revolutionary slumped in his bath, painted in Brussels in 1793 while David lived there in exile.

Go down instead and you reach the Magritte Museum, several floors given over to the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, more than 200 of his works, the bowler hats and floating stones and the pipes that insist they are not pipes.