Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the Americas and one of a handful in the world that try to tell the whole story of human creativity. Its main building on Fifth Avenue, at the edge of Central Park, holds about two million objects spanning five thousand years, from an Egyptian temple rebuilt stone by stone to a Jackson Pollock drip painting, with medieval armour, Renaissance altarpieces, Islamic carpets, African masks and American period rooms in between. A second site, the Cloisters in northern Manhattan, is devoted to medieval Europe.

The building is a small city. The Great Hall at the Fifth Avenue entrance opens onto the grand staircase leading up to the European paintings, with Egyptian Art stretching away to the right on the ground floor and Greek and Roman Art to the left. The American Wing, the Arms and Armor court and the Temple of Dendur occupy the north side, while the Modern and Contemporary galleries and the Asian collections fill the south and the upper floors. Numbered galleries on the free map make everything easy to find.

Nobody sees the Met in a day. Choose two or three departments, allow a full morning or afternoon, and leave time for the rooftop garden in summer. The museum is calmest at opening time on weekdays and busiest on weekend afternoons.