Caravaggio is widely considered one of the most influential painters in history, an artist who defined his era. He also led a tumultuous life, killing a man in a street brawl, which led him to spend the rest of his short life on the run, painting furiously as he went. An uncompromising visionary, Caravaggio upset the very clergy that commissioned his work, reimagining the most sacred of scenes in unorthodox ways.

The best museums with Caravaggio paintings are scattered across six countries, holding the roughly 80 works he left behind.

Caravaggio’s Life in Brief

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan in 1571. After training under a competent but unremarkable Milanese painter, he arrived in Rome around 1592 and swiftly found patronage under Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. Under his patron, who gave him lodgings and an introduction, the young Caravaggio moved from small secular paintings for private collectors to major church commissions within just a few years. What set him apart from the start was his use of light, a single raking source that made skin look alive, and sacred subjects look human in ways that delighted some and unsettled others. Caravaggio’s use of light and the contrast between light and dark (chiaroscuro, in Italian) was a game-changer in the Baroque art world.

It is around this time that his hot-blooded temper began to show. By the early 1600s, Caravaggio’s police record ran to multiple assaults, illegal weapons charges, and at least one incident we know of involving a plate of artichokes being thrown at a waiter. But it was the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606, a man Caravaggio had several physical run-ins with, that forced the talented painter into a life on the run. In his four years of exile, which saw him flee first to Naples, then Malta, and eventually Sicily, Caravaggio would continue to paint unabated. He lobbied all his major contacts for a papal pardon while in exile, his plea eventually heard in 1610.

To kickstart your tour of museums with Caravaggio paintings, it might help to first understand what this young artist was capable of and how the Catholic Church both craved and struggled with his work. To this end, the very best place to start is no museum at all, but a small chapel just a few minutes’ walk from the Pantheon in Rome.

1. San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, Italy

The Contarelli Chapel, a working church, holds three Caravaggio paintings that one could easily claim “made” his name. The Calling of Saint Matthew (1600) shows the moment Christ summons a tax collector from his counting table, and just about everything about it is enchanting: the tax collector wearing contemporary Roman clothes, a room with no discernible holiness about it at all, and a single beam of light carrying much of the painting’s meaning. The clergy were not especially delighted with the piece, but they accepted it nonetheless.

The third chapel painting, Saint Matthew and the Angel, fared even worse. Caravaggio’s first version showed Matthew as a rough peasant with dirty feet, the angel practically guiding his illiterate hand through the gospel text. This one was initially rejected outright, deemed far too undignified by the clergy. He then painted a tamer replacement for the wall, while the rejected original made its way into the collection of Berlin’s Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, where it was destroyed in 1945 during World War II and is now known only through photographs.

Insider Tip: Entry is free, but the paintings are lit by coin-operated lights, so bring a couple of euro coins. Note that the church, like most things in Rome, closes for lunch.

The start of a brilliant (albeit short-lived) career: The Contarelli commission launched Caravaggio into the top tier of Roman painters, and more commissions followed in quick succession. But so did trouble, of course, and so did the paintings that the Church found a little too edgy to keep. Caravaggio would then choose to make smaller, more personal work for private collectors during his early years in Rome.

2. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

The Death of the Virgin (c. 1604) was one of those pieces commissioned for a Roman church and rejected almost as soon as it was delivered. Caravaggio had painted the Virgin Mary lying down, bloated, her feet toward the viewer, and surrounded by apostles who looked more like dock workers than disciples. The rumor mill began almost immediately, with people saying that the model who posed for the painting was a local prostitute. The Carmelite friars who had commissioned the painting, flushed to no end, promptly sent it back.

What happened next says a great deal about how the art world actually worked, and undoubtedly still does. Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, who recognized the painting’s value, advised the Duke of Mantua to buy it, and it went on brief public display in Rome before leaving the city for good. Contemporary accounts record that painters queued to see it in those final days. The piece eventually passed into the French royal collection and has been at the Louvre ever since, nearly four meters (13 feet) tall and as unapologetic as the day it was rejected.

Caravaggio on the run: The killing that changed the course of Caravaggio’s life happened on May 28, 1606, during what appears to have been a brawl at a tennis match. Ranuccio Tomassoni died of his wounds, and Caravaggio fled Rome that same night, with a capital sentence issued against him that gave any citizen of Rome the legal right to kill him on sight. He never managed to return. The four years of exile that followed eventually took him to Malta, where the Knights of St John gave him the largest commission of his career, the piece you ought to see next.

3. Co-Cathedral of St John, Valletta, Malta

The Beheading of St John the Baptist (1608) is the only painting Caravaggio ever signed, and he chose to do so in the painted blood pooling beneath the Baptist’s severed head, a detail you can catch if you stand close enough. At roughly 3.7 by 5.2 meters (13 by 17 feet), it is also the largest painting he ever made, and it hangs in the Oratory of the Co-Cathedral of St John in Valletta, in a room that was purpose-built to house it.

Less than a year before, the Knights had made him one of their own, giving him an actual knighthood, which was no small turnaround for a man with a death sentence waiting back in Rome. It did not last. Within months, he was back in prison, this time in Malta on a charge the records never quite spell out, before escaping by rope and fleeing to Sicily. Nobody has ever worked out how he got over the walls. The Knights had the last word, though. That December, they gathered in this same oratory, in front of the painting he had made for them, and threw him out of the order as “a rotten and fetid limb.”

4. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy

Of the six Caravaggios in the Galleria Borghese, the most arresting is David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1610), painted during the artist’s final months while he was desperately seeking a papal pardon. Many scholars believe the severed head is a self-portrait, making the work feel less like a biblical scene than a grim act of self-reckoning. Nearby hangs Boy with a Basket of Fruit (one of his earliest Roman paintings), which highlights just how much his style evolved over less than two decades. The collection also includes Saint Jerome Writing, the Madonna dei Palafrenieri, and the Young Sick Bacchus, giving a rare overview of Caravaggio’s career in one fell swoop.

The collection itself has a colorful history of its own accord. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope’s nephew and one of Rome’s most aggressive and ruthless collectors, acquired masterpieces with a determination that occasionally strayed into outright coercion. The result is one of the finest art collections in Italy, assembled by methods that would raise many an eyebrow today.

Wherever Caravaggio went, trouble followed: By late 1609, Caravaggio was back in Naples for the second time, having been forced to flee Sicily as well. The papal pardon was reportedly close to being issued. Then he was attacked outside a tavern, badly enough that some accounts suggest he was nearly killed, possibly by agents of the Tomassoni family looking for revenge. Caravaggio did survive the attack, and he returned to painting at once.

5. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy

The Flagellation of Christ (1607) belongs to Caravaggio’s years in Naples: three torturers closing in on Christ at the column, most of the canvas given over to darkness. Tommaso de Franchis commissioned it for his family chapel in San Domenico Maggiore, and there it stayed for something like 350 years, written up in the city guidebooks and gawked at by travelers. The worries around safety and conservation finally saw the piece moved up the hill to the Capodimonte in 1972. It is plausible that Caravaggio may have come back to it, since some believe he reworked the picture as late as 1610, in the last months of his life.

Even though the painting has moved on, the church itself is still worth a look while you are in Naples. For a Caravaggio that never left its original setting, you want the nearby Pio Monte della Misericordia, where his Seven Works of Mercy still hang in the spot it was made for. For the Capodimonte itself, allow at least half a day. The museum occupies a royal palace in a large park above the city, and the collection extends well beyond Caravaggio.

Caravaggio died in July 1610 on a beach at Porto Ercole, after being mistakenly detained there while his boat, carrying several of his paintings, went on without him. He fell ill, developed a fever, and died within days, just three days short of his pardon. A life and a talent cut short way too soon, yet an influence that is still felt in the art world over four centuries later.

6. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Of the three Caravaggios in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, the most compelling is the Madonna of the Rosary (1606–7), painted in Naples in the weeks immediately after the killing and his flight from Rome. It was commissioned but never delivered to its original patron, and ended up on the open market, where a group of Flemish painters (among them Rubens) joined forces to buy it and donate it to a church in Antwerp, specifically so that other northern painters would have the chance to study it.

Few stories capture Caravaggio’s reputation better. He was a wanted man living in exile, yet some of the most important painters in northern Europe were willing to pool their money so others could study his work. The painting eventually made its way into the Habsburg collection and has been in Vienna ever since, and knowing the circumstances in which it was made really does change how it looks when you stand in front of it.

From its inception in 1299, when Sultan Osman I founded an empire that would grow to cover vast swaths of North Africa, Europe, and West Asia. But Constantinople posed an issue. This vast, heavily defended city on the banks of the Bosphorus stood between the Ottomans and their expansion to the west.

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, led by Mehmed II, on May 29, 1453, marked not only the end of Byzantine Constantinople, but the end of an empire which had begun in Rome some 15 centuries earlier.

The Significance of the Fall of the Theodosian Walls

The siege of 1453 wasn’t the first Ottoman attempt to penetrate the walls of Constantinople. Ottoman armies had laid siege to the city unsuccessfully in 1391, between 1394 and 1402, and then again in 1411 and 1422.

But Constantinople had been designed to be impenetrable. Protected by the towering Theodosian Walls, at their highest point standing 12 meters (39 feet) tall, by medieval standards, Constantinople truly was impregnable.

The 1453 Conquest of Constantinople

On April 6, 1453, a 70,000-strong Ottoman taskforce surrounded Constantinople. Initially, they focused on Byzantine strongholds outside of the city, as a chain across Golden Horn Bay prevented access to the city itself. After three weeks, the Ottoman army dragged their boats overland to breach Constantinople from the north. Alas, still, the Theodosian Walls held the attackers at bay.

The Ottomans’ initial attempts to breach the walls were in vain. When traditional assaults by land led to a significant number of casualties, the assaulting Ottomans changed their tactics and attempted to tunnel underneath the walls. Their success was short-lived.

On May 23, just a week after construction of the first tunnel had begun, Byzantine forces captured and tortured two Turkish officers who divulged the location of the remaining tunnels.

How Cannons & Gunpowder Marked the End of Medieval Warfare

With traditional methods and an attempt at negotiations failing, Sultan Mehmed II had one final weapon in his arsenal, a weapon which the Byzantines had been offered the previous year but had been unable to afford.

The Basilica cannon, better known as the Great Turkish Cannon, was designed in 1452 by a Hungarian engineer named Orban. Persuaded by Orban’s claims that his new cannon was strong enough to blast through the walls of Babylon, Mehmed II saw it as the potential solution to bring down the Theodosian Walls. Having provided Orban with the materials and a not insignificant salary, the cannon was built at Adrianople (now Edirne, on the Turkish-Greek border) in just three months.

In the early hours of May 29, Mehmed’s army launched its final assault on Constantinople. Initially focusing on one of the weakest sections of the walls, the first to gain entrance to the city were quickly pushed back by the defending Byzantine troops. But Mehmed had kept his best men back for the final push. The first launch of their grand new cannon left the defenders in chaos; many Venetian and Genoese fled to their ships, Greek soldiers ran for cover, and those Genoese who had been unable to escape sought shelter in the winding passageways of Galata.

Constantine and his own soldiers were left alone to defend the city. The emperor himself led one final charge against the Ottomans, but it was to no avail. He and his men fought to the death, and the emperor himself may have been decapitated. Another version of events, the account of a Venetian ship’s doctor, Nicolo Barbaro, has it that Constantine hanged himself as soon as the Ottomans breached the walls.

Constantine’s fate aside, the Queen of Cities, the centerpiece of the once great Byzantine Empire, had been taken by Mehmed’s men in less than 12 hours in this final assault. The Ottoman Empire had a new capital, one from which it would rule until it too met its end in 1922.

Why the Conversion of the Hagia Sophia Signaled a New Religious Era

Fascinating as the events of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 were, as is so often the case, what followed is of far greater significance. The Ottoman Empire was, and remained until its end, Islamic. The Byzantine Empire, born from the Roman Empire, was Christian. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople gave rise to a Byzantine to Ottoman transition which far transcended a change of ruler.

There’s a common misconception amongst visitors to Istanbul that the Hagia Sophia is a purpose-built mosque. Istanbul’s other iconic mosque, the Sultanahmet Camii (or Blue Mosque), which stands adjacent to the Hagia Sophia, was built as a mosque between 1609 and 1617, but the Hagia Sophia itself is a relic from the Byzantine era.

When you stop and examine the building a little more closely, the design of the dome is a key indicator that what is now one of the world’s most renowned mosques was, in fact, built as an Eastern Orthodox church. The minarets on its periphery were added after the end of the Byzantine Empire. One, no longer surviving, example was built shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the remaining minarets being completed during the 16th century.

The religious status of the Hagia Sopfia is something that, even today, presents as a controversial issue. With the birth of the new, post-Ottoman Turkish Republic in 1923 came a shift from Islamist policies to a secular constitution. With that, the Republic’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had the Hagia Sophia converted into a museum in the mid-1930s. In 2020, the Hagia Sophia regained its status as a mosque, one of many acts of the current Erdogan administration dubbed by critics as an attempt at Islamifying the Turkish state once more.

The Rebuilding of a City After the Ottoman Conquest

By the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s toppling of Byzantine Constantinople, the city was a shadow of its former glory. At its peak in the mid-6th century, Constantinople was home to around 500,000 people. By 1453, that figure had fallen to between 40,000 and 50,000. Naturally, this decline in population had a disastrous impact on Constantinople’s economy.

The Rise of the Grand Bazaar Created a Central Point for Global Trade

Constantinople had long been a major part of the ancient Silk Road trade route. As the Byzantine Empire’s capital, it took on a key role in controlling trade to the west. Constantinople was a final trading post on the northern Silk Road route, with goods destined for the city passing through Ottoman-controlled Anatolia.

When Constantinople fell, that trade began to dwindle. Western powers looked for new routes to and from the East. Recognizing the impact this could have on Constantinople, Mehmed II developed plans to reignite that trade. In an attempt to broaden Constantinople’s, and with it the Ottoman Empire’s, economic prospects, he initiated the building of a large covered market where traders from the Silk Road and merchants from the west could converge.

The initial Grand Bazaar was, in scale, nothing compared to what we see today. Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, the market grew, being extended and combined with adjoining markets. By the early 17th century, the Grand Bazaar took its current form, home to 3,000 traders.

To this day, the Grand Bazaar is one of the world’s largest covered markets, playing host to 4,000 shops and as many as 400,000 visitors every day.

From Byzantine Law to Ottoman Administration

Just as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople led to a religious transformation, the end of the Byzantine Empire paved the way for a transformation of the city’s legal system. The old Roman ways of the Byzantine era were replaced with those of the Ottoman Empire.

The Implementation of the Millet System

One of the key challenges faced by Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople was to accommodate its religiously diverse population. As the center of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the seat of its Ecumenical Patriarchate, despite the fall of Constantinople, Christianity would continue to be a major religion. The city was also seeing a rapidly increasing Jewish population, alongside Muslim arrivals from Anatolia.

Mehmed’s solution was to develop a legal system that would allow members of religious communities to be held accountable to their own laws. Now referred to as “millets,” though the name wasn’t coined until some centuries later, independent courts were established to preside over each community.

To this day, many former Ottoman countries continue to employ modern versions of the Millet system. A number of Arab nations hold Muslim citizens accountable to Sharia law, while Christian and Jewish populations follow civil law. In Europe, only Greece continues to adopt a limited Millet-style approach, with Muslims having the option of Sharia courts presiding over family legal matters.

How Mehmed II Adopted the Title of Caesar of Rome

While Mehmed the Conqueror is Sultan Mehmed II’s most well-known moniker, following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, he adopted the self-styled title of “Caesar of Rome.” With the fall of Rome in 476 and Byzantium’s prior emergence as Constantinople, the latter had been the seat of Roman power for almost 1,000 years.

In Mehmed’s eyes, he who ruled Constantinople ruled the Roman Empire. Of course, this was far from the reality of the situation. By the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to a fragment of its former self, controlling little more than the city itself and the Peloponnese.

There can be no doubt that the fall of the Theodosian Walls marked a major milestone in the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of the West. But what it meant in terms of realistic territorial gain should not be exaggerated. By the time of Mehmed’s death in 1481, the empire stretched no further than the Balkans in the west and the Crimean Peninsula to the north.

Ancient Egypt unfolded across more than 30 dynasties from around 3100 BC to the Roman conquest in 30 BC, a span of roughly three millennia. Its tombs, temples, and papyri have been excavated, preserved, and dispersed to museums across three continents over the past two centuries, which means seeing the full picture really does require visiting more than just Cairo. The museums below cover the entire arc of Egyptian dynasties, from Predynastic figurines through to the Ptolemaic Era, with particular emphasis on the famous Old, Middle, and New kingdoms that produced the pharaohs almost everyone has heard of.

1. Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), Giza, Egypt

More than 30 years after its plan was first announced, the Grand Egyptian Museum finally opened to the public in November, 2025. It is the world’s largest archaeological museum dedicated to a single civilization, showcasing more than 100,000 artifacts. The twelve galleries are arranged chronologically, ranging from prehistoric Egypt to the Greco-Roman period.

The Grand Atrium alone spans 10,000 square meters (more than 100,000 square feet), while the Grand Staircase holds more than 60 monumental artifacts, culminating with a jaw-dropping panoramic view of the Giza Pyramids framed through a triangular window. The undisputed centerpiece is the Tutankhamun Gallery, which displays all 5,398 objects from the boy-king’s tomb together for the very first time since Howard Carter discovered them in 1922. His famous gold funerary mask sits behind bulletproof glass, getting the level of protection it deserves.

2. Egyptian Museum, Tahrir Square, Cairo

Even now that the gleaming new GEM is open, the original Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square remains an essential stop for anyone interested in Egyptian history. Opened in 1902, in a striking pink neoclassical building designed by French architect Marcel Dourgnon, it’s the oldest archaeological museum in the entire Middle East and once held the largest collection of pharaonic antiquities anywhere in the world, with over 170,000 items at its peak.

With the entire Tutankhamun collection now moved to GEM and the Royal Mummies have relocated to NMEC across town, the Tahrir museum has shifted focus to its remaining strengths. These include old kingdom statuary, middle kingdom sarcophagi, the spectacular collections from the tombs of Yuya and Thuya (Tutankhamun’s great-grandparents), and the artifacts unearthed from the royal tombs at Tanis.

The building itself, with its soaring central atrium and wonderfully old-fashioned 19th-century display cases packed to bursting, remains a kind of museum of museum history as much as a museum of Egypt. There’s an old-world charm to it that the slick new GEM simply can’t replicate.

3. National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC), Cairo

Opened in stages from 2017 and fully inaugurated in April 2021 with the unforgettable Pharaohs’ Golden Parade, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization sits in the Fustat district of Old Cairo. Unlike the other Cairo museums, NMEC traces the entire history of Egypt from prehistoric times right through to the present day, rather than stopping abruptly at the Roman conquest in 30 BC.

The undisputed showpiece of the museum is the spooky Royal Mummies Hall, where 22 mummies (18 kings and four queens) rest in dimly-lit, temperature-controlled cases. They include some of the most famous pharaohs ever to rule, like Seti I, Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep I, and the unidentified “Younger Lady” now widely believed to be Tutankhamun’s mother. Each mummy has an information panel showing the latest CT scans and DNA analyses, which adds a fascinating modern science aspect to the experience.

The wider galleries cover dynastic Egyptian history alongside Coptic, Islamic, and modern periods, giving a sense of cultural coherence that purely pharaonic museums tend to miss completely.

4. Museo Egizio, Turin (Italy)

Founded in 1824 by King Charles Felix of Savoy, Turin’s Museo Egizio is the world’s oldest museum dedicated entirely to ancient Egyptian culture and holds the largest collection of Egyptian treasures outside Cairo devoted exclusively to the civilization. Its roughly 40,000 artifacts are spread across four exhibition floors, and recently enjoyed a major expansion.

The Statuario, the museum’s grand double-height hall of pharaonic statues, has been a fixture since 1824 and was beautifully redesigned by Oscar-winning Italian set designer Dante Ferretti for the 2006 Winter Olympics. The intact tomb of the architect Kha and his wife Merit, excavated by Ernesto Schiaparelli (uncle of the famous fashion designer and an avid Egyptologist) at Deir el-Medina in 1906, is a rare example of a non-royal burial found completely undisturbed, with all its furniture, clothing, food offerings, and personal possessions still in place.

The small rock-cut temple of Ellesiya, gifted by Egypt in gratitude for Italy’s role in the rescue of the Nubian monuments in the 1960s, sits fully reassembled in its own dedicated gallery. The museum also holds three full copies of the Book of the Dead, one of which is the oldest known complete version anywhere.

While Egypt often campaigns for the return of its ancient treasures spread around the world, it has never requested that any be returned from Turin. So respected is the collection in Italy that the two countries collaborate closely on its upkeep. It really is, by far, the best museum for Egyptian dynasties outside Egypt.

5. The British Museum, London

The British Museum holds roughly 100,000 objects related to ancient Egypt, the largest such collection anywhere outside Egypt itself. Best of all, entry is free, and the famous Egyptian sculpture gallery is one of the very first spaces most visitors reach after coming through the main Great Russell Street entrance.

The Rosetta Stone is the most-visited single object in the entire museum. It was found by French soldiers near the town of Rosetta in 1799 and transferred to British possession under the 1801 Treaty of Alexandria. Its trilingual inscription (in hieroglyphs, Demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek) finally allowed French scholar Jean-François Champollion to crack the code of hieroglyphs in 1822, opening up 3,000 years of Egyptian history to the modern world.

Other major highlights include the colossal bust of Ramesses II, the elegant Gayer-Anderson Cat (a bronze sculpture from around 664 to 332 BC), the painted wooden coffin of Henutmehyt, and extensive holdings of papyri, jewelry, and shabtis. Egypt has been formally requesting the return of the Rosetta Stone for years, so far without success.

6. The Louvre, Paris

The Louvre’s Department of Egyptian Antiquities was founded back in 1826 (by none other than Champollion himself, the man who cracked the hieroglyphic code) and is one of the largest in the world, with approximately 50,000 objects displayed across two separate visitor circuits: a thematic tour of daily life on the ground floor and a chronological tour of pharaonic history on the floor above.

The Great Sphinx of Tanis, carved from striking pink granite around 1900 BC and associated with several New Kingdom pharaohs over the centuries, guards the entrance to the galleries. The famous Seated Scribe (Old Kingdom, around 2500 BC) remains startlingly lifelike after 4,500 years, with his inlaid eyes seeming to track viewers around the gallery.

Other major pieces include the Dendera zodiac ceiling (a beautifully detailed Ptolemaic sky map), the gold statuette of Queen Karomama, and a vast collection of Amarna-period art from the strange reign of Akhenaten, including fragments salvaged from his short-lived royal palace at Tell el-Amarna.

7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Art department holds approximately 26,000 objects dating from the Paleolithic through to the Roman Period. The astonishing aspect is that nearly all of them are on public display across 40 dedicated galleries on the museum’s first floor. Its single most dramatic object is the Temple of Dendur, a complete Roman-era sandstone temple built around 15 BC, under Emperor Augustus.

The temple was gifted to the United States by Egypt in 1965 in recognition of generous American aid during the UNESCO Nubian monuments rescue effort, and was painstakingly reassembled stone by stone in the glass-walled Sackler Wing overlooking Central Park in 1978.

Other highlights include the funerary assemblage of Meketre (a 12th Dynasty chancellor) with its remarkable painted wooden models of his estate, the gold jewelry of Princess Sithathoryunet, a Middle Kingdom blue faience hippopotamus affectionately nicknamed William (the museum’s unofficial mascot), and a full architectural model of the tomb of Perneb. The department also holds one of the finest collections of Amarna-period objects anywhere outside Cairo, ideal for anyone fascinated by Akhenaten’s revolutionary reign.

There’s an old adage that every road leads to Rome. At its height, Rome’s reach was so vast that no single modern museum could hope to hold all its material legacy. Some of the best museums for Roman history are in Rome (shockingly enough), but equally important collections sit in Naples, London, and a handful of provincial capitals across the former Empire. Here are the ones you shouldn’t miss.

1. Capitoline Museums, Rome

The Capitoline Museums have a strong claim to being the oldest public museum in the world. They occupy two Renaissance palaces on Piazza del Campidoglio, the square designed by Michelangelo.

The Capitoline Wolf is the symbol of the museum and the mascot of Rome itself. So revered is she that local soccer team AS Roma puts her on the team crest, and we all know how fanatical Italians get about their soccer. For centuries, the bronze she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus was assumed to be Etruscan, dating to around 500 BC. Then in 2006, restorer Anna Maria Carruba published her finding: the wolf had been cast in a single piece using a method medieval bronzeworkers favored, not the segmented Etruscan technique. Radiocarbon dating two years later placed her somewhere between the 11th and 12th centuries. Roman officials were not amused. The twins, by the way, were added in the 15th century.

The other piece worth seeking out is the original equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (the one in the piazza is a replica). It survived the Middle Ages only because early Christians mistook the pagan emperor for Constantine, the first Christian ruler, and refused to melt it down for scrap. Almost every other Imperial bronze equestrian got recycled into church doors or cannons. Marcus, ironically, a Stoic philosopher under whom waves of Christian persecution were carried out, owes his survival to a case of mistaken identity that lasted a thousand years.

2. National Roman Museum (Palazzo Massimo), Rome

The Museo Nazionale Romano is spread across four sites in central Rome. If you don’t have time to explore them all, opt for arguably the most important: Palazzo Massimo alle Terme near Termini Station. The upper floor recreates three rooms lifted from Roman villas (including the famous painted garden from Empress Livia‘s villa at Prima Porta).

But the piece to seek out is the Hellenistic Greek sculpture, the Boxer at Rest, a 1st-century BC bronze recovered in 1885 from the Quirinal Hill. He’s slumped on a rock after a fight, face battered and bumpy cauliflower ears unmistakable. His hands are still wrapped in the leather-and-metal caestus gloves that made Roman boxing closer to bare-knuckle slaughter than sport.

A combined ticket covers all four site over three days, which is enough time to do them all justice.

3. National Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN)

MANN holds the world’s finest collection of artifacts pulled from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and all the other cities buried by Vesuvius in AD 79. The Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun (around 1.5 million tesserae depicting Alexander smashing into Darius III at the Battle of Issus) is the most famous Roman piece. But the room that tells you most about Roman life is the Secret Cabinet.

When the Bourbon excavators started pulling phalluses and brothel frescoes out of Pompeii (along with garden statuary depicting the god Pan getting frisky with a goat), the royal family hid everything in a locked room. Access required written permission, and the only visitors allowed had to be men of “mature age and respected morals.” Women weren’t allowed in, period. Access remained heavily restricted under Fascism and only fully opened to the general public in 2000. The collection makes clear that the Romans had a much more relaxed relationship with their bodies than the Victorians, who eventually inherited their stuff.

Insider Tip: Visit MANN before Pompeii. Most of the finest pieces were moved to Naples for safekeeping, so the ruins can feel empty or almost meaningless unless you’ve seen the museum first. Naples is a 70-minute high-speed train from Rome’s Termini Station and potentially doable as a day trip if you don’t mind an early start.

4. The British Museum, London

The British Museum’s Roman collections span the breadth of the empire, from the Iberian Peninsula to Syria to Britannia. Why do the Brits have so much? Having an empire of their own helped, as did two centuries of well-funded archaeological digs, and having the often dubbed world’s first national museum (opened in 1759) with shelves itching to be filled.

The Portland Vase, a cameo-glass marvel from around AD 25 that inspired Wedgwood, is the most famous Roman piece on display. But the gossip-worthy one is the Warren Cup, a Roman silver drinking cup from the 1st century AD decorated with reliefs of two pairs of male lovers. It was bought in 1911 by an eccentric American collector named Edward Perry Warren (who also commissioned a marble version of Rodin’s The Kiss with an added erection that scandalized the English town it was later donated to).

Warren tried to sell the cup to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which refused it. In 1953, US customs banned it from entering the country altogether. The piece bounced between private collectors for decades before the British Museum bought it in 1999 for £1.8 million. It’s now displayed without fuss, which perhaps should’ve been the point all along. Entry is free.

5. Ara Pacis Museum, Rome

The Ara Pacis Museum is the only major Roman museum built around a single artifact, and that artifact has been through more than most. The Ara Pacis Augustae (the Altar of Augustan Peace) was commissioned by the Roman Senate in 13 BC and dedicated four years later to celebrate the peace Augustus had brought to the empire after his campaigns in Spain and Gaul.

Fragments had been surfacing in Roman digs since the 16th century, scattered between the Uffizi, the Louvre, and the Vatican, until Mussolini got involved. As part of his program to refashion himself as a 20th-century Augustus, Il Duce had them tracked down and reassembled for the 2000th anniversary of Augustus’s birth in 1937–38. A Fascist-era pavilion went up beside the Tiber to house the altar, conveniently next to the Mausoleum of Augustus that Mussolini had also restored. The propaganda was many things, but subtle was not one of them.

By the 1990s, the pavilion had become a leaky disaster, so the city commissioned American architect Richard Meier to design a replacement. Romans absolutely hated it, and critics called the new glass-and-travertine building a gas station, a McDonald’s, a coffin, and even a bunker. The mayor’s challenger ran on a promise to demolish it. He did not demolish it. The altar inside is still magnificent as ever.

6. Lugdunum Museum and Roman Theaters, Lyon, France

Lyon was founded in 43 BC as Lugdunum and served as the capital of Roman Gaul for three centuries. The Gallo-Roman Museum sits on the hillside of Fourvière alongside the ancient Roman theater and odeon (both still in use for summer concerts). Designed by Bernard Zehrfuss in 1975, the building is mostly buried in the hillside, and you spiral down through it on a long concrete ramp that mimics archaeological stratigraphy (the layers of soil and debris that build up over a site like tree rings).

The piece that makes a visit worthwhile is the Claudian Tables: bronze plaques inscribed with the verbatim speech Emperor Claudius gave to the Roman Senate in AD 48, arguing that Gauls should be admitted as senators. The historian Tacitus also recorded this speech, but he cleaned it up considerably for his Annals. The bronze version is the real, rambling argument Claudius actually gave, full of historical asides and defensive tangents. It is the closest thing we have to a recording of a Roman emperor in mid-speech.

If you are in the United States, you don’t need a passport to walk through ancient history. Some of the world’s most extraordinary antiquity collections reside in the US. From colossal 13-ton sphinxes and fully reconstructed Roman palace courtyards to sacred Maya artifacts and 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, American institutions preserve breathtaking glimpses of human origin. Whether you are a seasoned history buff or a curious traveler, these world-class research centers and university museums offer an immersive journey into our planet’s greatest ancient civilizations.

1. How Chicago’s ISAC Museum Reshaped Near Eastern Archaeology (Chicago, IL)

Located on the University of Chicago campus, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) is a world-class research museum holding a large collection of artifacts from the ancient Middle East and North Africa.

The Institute’s founder, James Henry Breasted, dreamed of creating a “laboratory for the study of the rise and development of civilization.” In 1919, with the financial help of John D. Rockefeller, that is exactly what he did.

On display across ten different galleries is the vast collection of material culture from some of the oldest civilizations in human history, including bronze figurines from Anatolia, gold jewelry from Persia, and Cuneiform tablets recording the epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia. One of the main attractions is the Khorsabad Court Gallery, which displays authentic monumental stone reliefs and a 40-ton lamassu excavated from the palace courtyard of Assyrian king Sargon II (721 to 705 BC).

Breasted was the first American to obtain a PhD in Egyptology, so it makes sense that the Institute also boasts a particularly interesting Egyptian history gallery. The collection includes over 800 Egyptian objects from roughly 5,000 BC to 600 AD. Many were brought back from university expeditions or purchased in the early 20th century by Breasted himself. Highlights include the mummy of Meresamun, a temple singer, and a written account of the first recorded labor strike in history.

The Institute is also a scholarly research center, undertaking research and archaeological projects in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The majority of the museum’s 350,000 artifacts were excavated by the Institute’s archaeologists and grad students. It continues to promote fieldwork in the Middle East and North Africa today for both professional and aspiring archaeologists.

2. Inside the Penn Museum and the Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia (Philadelphia, PA)

Located on Pennsylvania University’s campus, the Penn Museum is a top-tier museum when it comes to the study of ancient cultures from around the world. It has a 300,000 square foot exhibit space containing artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean world, Anatolia, East Asia, North and Central America, and Africa. The museum highlights objects from its own archaeological excavations and anthropological fieldwork.

Arguably one of the most visited galleries in the museum is their Ancient Egypt and Nubia Exhibit. One of the largest Egyptian collections in the world, the gallery contains countless objects and artworks representative of the daily lives and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, as well as treasures that belonged to the pharaohs.  A big draw in the exhibit is the Sphinx of Ramses II, a large 13-ton granite sphinx carved sometime between 1293 and 1185 BC and is the largest sphinx in the Western Hemisphere.

The Penn Museum is also home to the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM). CAAM offers laboratory and classroom facilities, materials, equipment, and expert personnel to mentor Penn students in a range of scientific techniques crucial to archaeologists and other scholars as they seek to interpret the past. This makes it one of the top schools in the country for pursuing archaeology and anthropology.

3. Step Inside the Getty Villa for Immersion in Classical Antiquity (Los Angeles, CA)

The Getty Villa Museum is one of the more unique museums to visit on this list. What is special about the Villa is that it is a recreation of a countryside estate from the Roman town of Herculaneum called the Villa dei Papiri (Villa of Papyruses). Visitors are transported back to the time of Caesar and Pompey as they wander through the lush gardens or learn how an impluvium works, making for a much more immersive experience.

On display are artworks from the Getty’s ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Roman collections. The museum is separated into two floors with the exhibits flowing chronologically, starting with the Stone Age and going through the end of the Roman Empire. Mosaics, statues, frescoes, pottery, and fine jewelry are just a handful of the objects that adorn the galleries of this traditional Roman villa.

One of the key pieces is a statue called Victorious Youth. It is one of the few life-sized Greek bronze statues to have survived to the present day. It provides much information on the technology of ancient bronze casting, making it a critical find.

Another beautiful statue in the collection is Leda and the Swan, which is inspired by the Greek mythological tale of Zeus, who disguised himself as a swan to seduce Leda, the Queen of Sparta. More than two dozen examples of this statue exist today, mostly Roman replicas of the Greek originals, attesting to the story’s popularity and Greek influence on the Romans.

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Its Monumental Treasures (New York City, NY)

Arguably the most well-known museum on this list, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (informally known as The Met) is home to over 1.5 million works of art spanning 5,000 years, and its 633,000-square-foot footprint makes it the fourth-largest museum in the world by floor area. The museum features art spanning 5,000 years of human history and from every corner of the globe. That being said, their ancient art exhibits are nothing short of extraordinary.

The museum’s Egyptian exhibit alone is made up of 38 galleries with beautiful works from all periods of Egypt’s history. Highlights include massive statues of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, intricately decorated coffins of high officials, and recreated tomb art from the Old Kingdom (c. 2700 to 2200 BC). One of the main attractions is the Temple of Dendur, a Roman-period temple to the goddess Isis which was taken apart in Egypt before being shipped and put back together in the US as a gift from the Egyptian government in the 1960s.

The Met’s Greek and Roman art exhibit is just as exquisite, with over 5,300 objects on view from the many different periods of the two Mediterranean civilizations. The main draw is the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court. It is a monumental, skylit peristyle for the display of Hellenic and Roman art with a soaring two-story atrium. Objects worth seeing include bronze sculptures from Classical Greece, marble portraits of Roman emperors, and frescoes from a Roman villa. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

The Met also boasts a world-class research center with a focus on several topics including conservation and provenance.

5. Exploring Daily Life in the Ancient Mediterranean at the Kelsey Museum (Ann Arbor, MI)

Situated on the University of Michigan campus, the Kelsey Museum houses a collection of more than 100,000 ancient and medieval objects from the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. Among its most significant holdings are 45,000 daily-life objects from the Greco-Roman town of Karanis in Egypt, the largest collection of its kind outside of Cairo.

A unique feature of the Kelsey’s ancient Rome exhibit is a reproduction of murals from the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. The murals depict a young bride-to-be as she goes through the stages of initiation into a Bacchic mystery cult before her wedding day. In 1924, Francis Kelsey (the museum’s founder) commissioned Italian artist Maria Barosso to replicate the Pompeian murals, but Kelsey died before they were completed. When they were shipped to the US, they sat in storage for decades, with only a few panels being put on display once in a while for special programs. It was not until 2000 that the murals were displayed in their entirety for an exhibition on cultic rites practiced by Roman women.

The museum also works with the Archaeology, History, and Classical Studies departments at the university to sponsor field research in the Mediterranean region and Middle East. Like Breasted with the ISAC in Chicago, this program has a long tradition dating back to Kelsey himself going on expeditions to Egypt and Mesopotamia in the early 20th century and procuring many of the artifacts found in the museum today. Work today focuses on sites in Italy, Greece, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, and Tunisia, and is arguably one of the best archaeology programs in the US.

6. Discovering Old Kingdom Egyptian Splendor at the MFA Boston (Boston, MA)

Founded in 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is a world-renowned institution housing around 450,000 objects and artworks ranging from Egyptian mummies to contemporary paintings. Its Greek and Roman art exhibit is truly a marvel.

The main antiquities wing underwent a recent transformation, creating a grand entrance to the exhibition and new displays to highlight key pieces in the collection. Early Greek pottery, Roman marble portraits, mythological scenes, and daily life objects, such as coins, jewelry, and lamps, are just a few of the objects on display. One of the highlights of this collection is a colossal statue of the Roman goddess Juno, which was traditionally claimed to be made for the Theater of Pompey in the 1st century BC, but probably comes from the 2nd century AD. The statue then traveled from place to place over the centuries, being housed in several private estates before coming to the Fine Arts Museum.

The museum’s Egyptian art exhibit is one of the most extensive in the world outside Cairo, containing over 16,000 pieces spanning from 6,500 BC to 600 AD. Among these are 140 funerary objects, including richly painted coffins, canopic jars, embalming tools, and anything else involved in burial rituals and preparing the soul of the deceased for their journey to the afterlife.

7. Why the Michael C. Carlos Museum Is the Southeast’s Antiquities Hub (Atlanta, GA)

The Michael C. Carlos Museum is located on Emory University’s campus just outside downtown Atlanta, and pretty much specializes in all things ancient. Their galleries feature artifacts from Africa, the Americas, ancient Egypt, Nubia, the Near East, ancient Greece, Rome, and South Asia.

The museum’s collection of Greek and Roman Art comprises over 5,400 Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Cypriot, and Bronze Age Aegean artifacts. Mythology was a major part of the Mediterranean peoples’ everyday lives, as evidenced by the plethora of objects (including oil lamps, statuettes, ceramics, and more) depicting Greek and Roman gods and goddesses in this collection.

The museum began in the 1920’s with a set of Roman coins and expanded piecemeal throughout the 20th century. It has developed into one of the most significant collections of Greek and Roman art in the American Southeast.

The museum also notably holds one of the most extensive collections of Native American art in the country, setting it apart from others on this list. It has more than 3,300 ancient and contemporary pieces from North, Central, and South America, spanning 4,000 years. Their ancient Costa Rican collection is of particular interest, including greenstone ceremonial axes and stone metates (grinding stones).

8. How the Nelson-Atkins Museum Preserves Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean Art (Kansas City, MO)

Many would not think of Kansas City for their fine arts scene, but the Nelson-Atkins Museum has a surprisingly large and elaborate collection of antiquities. Their ancient art collection spans more than 4,000 years of history from the Near East, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations.

The Egyptian galleries contain an extensive collection of stone portraiture depicting prominent pharaohs and queens, spanning from Sen-useret III and Ramses II to Nefertiti and the Ptolemaic rulers. Particularly significant is the 2007 acquisition of the funerary items of the noblewoman Meret-it-es. Comprising two coffins, cartonnage, and 304 servant statuettes, the assemblage collectively occupies nearly an entire gallery space.

These eight extraordinary museums bring the wonder of ancient civilizations right to our doorstep. From world-class university research labs to monumental metropolitan galleries, these institutions prove that exploring the deep past doesn’t require crossing an ocean.

Medieval castles were much more than towering residences for ruling elites. They were formidable fortresses, administrative centers, and physical expressions of political power. From the stone bastions of Northern Europe to the soaring timber frameworks of Japan’s castles, these eight magnificent strongholds stand today as enduring monuments to human ingenuity, strategic design, and the turbulent history of the medieval era.

1. Edinburgh Castle, Scotland (11th Century)

Edinburgh Castle, sitting high atop the city bearing the same name, started life in the early 11th century when King Malcolm III established the first recorded castle on the site. Future kings would add pieces. King David I added St Margaret’s Chapel in honor of his mother in 1130, and it is the oldest standing building in Edinburgh today. David’s Tower was constructed by David II in the 1370s-1380s following destruction during the Wars of Scottish Independence. In 1510, King James IV added the Great Hall, and in the 1570s, the Half Moon Battery was erected to rebuild the fortress after it was severely damaged in the Lang Siege.

The castle was at the center of many conflicts in Scottish history. During the late 13th and 14th centuries, the fortress changed hands repeatedly between English and Scottish forces. Robert the Bruce then famously ordered the castle’s defenses destroyed so it could not be held by English forces. In the 16th century, the castle was held by loyalists for Mary Queen of Scots, enduring a two-year artillery bombardment that destroyed much of its medieval architecture. She also gave birth to James VI there, who would become King James I of England.

Today Edinburgh Castle is a war memorial and popular tourist destination, welcoming around two million visitors each year.

2. Windsor Castle, England (11th Century)

Nestled in the county of Berkshire, Windsor Castle could be one of the world’s most famous structures. One undisputed fact: Windsor Castle is the oldest inhabited castle. Started by William the Conqueror in the 11th century as part of a ring of defensive castles around London, subsequent rulers made improvements. It was originally a Norman Castle of wooden motte-and-bailey design, but was transformed into heavy stone fortifications under King Henry II and King Edward III, who started to use the castle as an official residence around 1350.

Though not a genuinely Gothic castle, Windsor contains many Gothic features. St George’s Chapel, built in 1348, has flying buttresses, pointed arches, and large stained-glass windows. The Round Tower, in the Castle’s center, was a central defensive point.

The British Royal Family uses Windsor Castle as a weekend residence. It is also the setting for when a citizen receives an award from the Royal Family. The State Apartments house world-famous artwork by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, alongside armor worn by King Henry VIII.

3. The Alhambra, Spain (12th Century)

Alhambra Castle in Granada, southern Spain, is situated on a hill as an imposing fortress complex. The Moors (Muslim inhabitants of Spain) built the Castle atop Roman ruins in the 12th century. After the Christian Reconquest in 1492, it became a royal place. In 1527, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V commissioned a massive Renaissance-style palace right in the middle of the Islamic Nasrid complex, creating a striking visual contrast between Renaissance and Moorish architecture.

The imposing external fortress structure is juxtaposed with delicate internal design features. Among Alhambra’s features are reflecting pools, fountains, and channels. These embody paradise in Islamic culture. The Court of the Lions has a central fountain braced by a dozen marble lions. The ornate décor, featuring geometric patterns and calligraphy, adorns many of the rooms.

To combat the intense Andalusian heat, Nasrid engineers diverted water from the Darro River over six kilometers away using complex hydraulic channels. Running water, shaded courtyards, and deep basins act as natural evaporative cooling systems throughout the palaces

4. Eltz Castle, Germany (12th Century)

Eltz Castle is hidden in a forested valley above the Moselle River in Germany and has continuously expanded since the twelfth century. It is one of only two German castles among dozens never to have been destroyed and rebuilt. The castle has been held by the Eltz family since at least 1157, making it one of the very few historic estates continuously lived in and preserved by the same lineage for over 800 years. Because it escaped fire and sacking, its interior rooms contain rare 500-year-old original furnishings, armaments, tapestries, and gold artifacts preserved across centuries.

In 1268, three Eltz brothers divided the family inheritance but agreed to share the castle. Different branches of the family built their own separate tower houses and living spaces on the rock, resulting in the castle’s unique, multi-turreted “fairytale” skyline. Today, Eltz Castle is known for blending Gothic, Baroque, and Romanesque architecture. Boasting eight 35-meter-high towers and timber frames, this Castle makes for an unusual sight. Set amidst a natural preserve, visitors get a medieval castle’s full look with no modern structures around.

5. Himeji Castle, Japan (14th Century)

Japan, with its iconic militaristic samurai heritage, is no stranger to castles. With 100 remaining from feudal times, Himeji Castle’s construction began in 1333 and expanded massively in the 17th century. But of surviving Japanese castles, only 12 retain their historic wooden central keeps. Himeji is the largest, most complete, and best preserved of these 12 original castles. Due to the plaster-covered walls and its soaring roofs, Himeji is nicknamed “White Heron Castle,” as it looks like a soaring white bird.

Like many fortresses, Himeji Castle is a hilltop fort. Unlike European castles built of stone, timber framing provides the backbone. Thick, wooden walls, plastered in white paint, give Himeji its bright appearance. The base is stone, like most Japanese castles. Castle defenses are very intimidating to any attacker. Himeji’s defenses take on unusual parts, like a maze-like pathway to slow or confuse attackers. A more brutal defense is the stone drop windows or ishi-otoshi; defenders dropped rocks onto their besiegers’ heads. But while it was designed for war, the castle has never been attacked.

6. Malbork Castle, Poland (13th Century)

Malbork Castle started life as the Teutonic Knights’ headquarters in Malbork, Poland. These German Roman Catholic knights ruled much of Europe at the time, and originally named the castle Marienburg, in honor of the Virgin Mary. In 1309, Grand Master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen moved the headquarters of the entire Teutonic Order from Venice to Malbork, transforming the fortress into the administrative and military capital of their Baltic state.

Red bricks were characteristic of Teutonic buildings due to a lack of stone. The castle is estimated to comprise between 30 and 50 million handmade bricks. Construction began in 1274, with the final parts added by 1406. By then, Malbork Castle covered an impressive 44 acres or 143,591 square meters. It includes three tiers. The High Castle is the oldest and most heavily fortified section, housing the convent, chapter house, and Church of St Mary. The Middle Castle has the Grand Master’s Palace and vast banquet halls for receiving Europe’s nobility. The Low Castle is home to the armories, stables, granaries, breweries, and other day-to-day essentials.

The Teutonic Order lost the Castle in 1410 when it fell into the hands of mercenaries. Poland purchased the castle from them in 1457 during the Thirteen Years’ War. Over time and due to neglect, Malbork had fallen into disrepair by the 1940s, and then more than half the castle was destroyed in World War II. A thorough post-war effort restored the Castle to its initial appearance. Today, it serves as a museum.

According to SIL International, there are over 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Most people have a single first language, and about 40% of people speak a second language fluently. This is more common in multicultural countries like Indonesia, where two-thirds of the population is bilingual, compared to about 20% in the United States. While some languages are clearly related, such as Spanish and Portuguese, other languages have completely different lexical and grammatical features. For example, English speakers often struggle with the tonal nature of Chinese and the unfamiliar written characters. How hard it is to learn a new language often depends on the languages you already know. What languages are considered the hardest for English speakers?

Understanding Language Families

Learning a language that is closely related to the learner’s first language is generally easier than learning an unrelated language. Therefore, for English speakers, many other European languages are easier to learn than, for example, Vietnamese, Nahuatl, or Navajo!

The closer a language is on the linguistic family tree to English, the easier it is for an English speaker to learn. English belongs to the Germanic group of languages, which also includes German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Afrikaans.

Germanic is part of the broader Indo-European family tree, and about 40% of the global population speaks Indo-European languages. Within this tree, Germanic languages are closely related to Romance languages, derived from Latin (spoken by the Romans), including French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. These languages will usually be easier for an English speaker to learn than a more distant language, such as Arabic.

Another major group of European languages is the Slavic group, which includes Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Croatian.

Other European languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, belong to the Uralic Language group and are even further removed from English. Finnish and Hungarian have even gained reputations as being notoriously difficult to learn.

Foreign Service Institute Ranking

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the United States’ primary training institution for members of the US foreign service community. As such, the FSI is responsible for helping professionals and other diplomats learn languages to promote US foreign policy. The FSI categorizes languages based on how easy they are to learn from an English perspective. Languages are ranked from Category I (easiest) to Category V (hardest). Category I includes languages that require 24-30 weeks (600-750 hours) to learn. Several Germanic and Romance languages fall into this category, and include Norwegian, Afrikaans, French, and Spanish.

Although German is closely related to English, it has significant complexities that differentiate it from English and make it a more difficult language to learn than Category I languages. It is a Category II language, and learners can expect to master the language only after 30 weeks (750 hours) of intense study. Moving into language groups unrelated to English, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Swahili are category III languages requiring 36 weeks (900 hours) of study.

Category IV Languages require at least 44 weeks (1100 hours) of study, and include Bulgarian, Hindi, Russian, Greek, Czech, Thai, Finnish, Estonian, Tagalog, Xhosa, and Zulu, among many others.

Category V: The Hardest Languages to Learn (From an English Perspective!)

Reaching Category V and requiring 88 weeks (2200 hours) to learn, there are a handful of languages that require intense study to master. These languages are Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese. Of these languages, Japanese, with its differing syntax, three different writing systems, and complicated hierarchy of etiquette, is considered the most difficult.

If you were to stand in the Roman ruins of the Colosseum on an afternoon in July, the worst you’d face would be oppressive heat and a sweaty shuffle toward the exit. Nearly 2,000 years ago, that very same spot looked down on blood-soaked sand raked clean between slaughters, your throat itchy as the air filled with thick, rancid smells.

While we love romanticizing ancient Rome as all marble forums and philosopher-emperors, the tragedy is that, for the most part, the empire was held together by systematic killings, a sprawling sex trade, mass enslavement, and executions that doubled as public entertainment.

1. The Mamertine Prison, Rome

Beneath a church at the foot of the Capitoline is a small and thoroughly unappealing stone chamber the Romans reserved for their most loathed enemies. The lower room is shaped like a bottle and, in its earliest phase, the only way in or out was through a hole in the ceiling. Prisoners would be lowered through it and, more often than not, never brought back up. The historian Sallust called the place repellent for its “filth and darkness,” but that seems a bit redundant nowadays, given that it was arguably the entire point.

The prison’s real function was clearest at the end of a triumphant battle, spearheading the victory parade every Roman general longed to lead. While the crowd cheered and the general made his way toward the Capitol, the captured enemy leader was quietly pulled from the procession, taken down into the Mamertine, and strangled out of view.

Vercingetorix, the Gallic chieftain who gave Julius Caesar his toughest fight, was kept alive for years so he could be displayed and then eventually killed in this way. The North African king Jugurtha met a much slower and more agonizing version of the same fate, in the same cell, left to waste away.

By the Middle Ages, the dungeon had been rebranded as a shrine, on the tradition that St. Peter was held there and miraculously brought a spring up from the floor to baptize his jailers.

2. The Brothel of Pompeii

Pompeii has a dark history in every direction, a town frozen at the moment of death. But nature caused this particular disaster, so, somehow, it makes the place feel less sinister than others on this list. But that innocence is only on the surface. Head below ground and you’ll find a building that says more about everyday Roman sleaziness than any collapsed roof: the Lupanar, Pompeii’s purpose-built brothel dungeon.

This cramped two-story block had five small rooms downstairs, each fitted with a built-in masonry bed that would have held a thin mattress. Erotic frescoes, like the one pictured above, are found on the doorways. Some scholars describe them as menus of “services rendered herein,” though that reading is still very much debated. They may simply have been there to set a mood.

More than a hundred messages are scratched into the plaster of the rooms. A fair few seem to have been left by the sex workers themselves, most of them likely enslaved, many with Greek names pointing to the eastern edges of the empire. They recorded their own names and the men they’d been with, sometimes with a boast attached. The going rate, as it was scratched on the walls, was roughly the price of a couple of cups of wine.

The word lupa, “she-wolf,” was slang for a prostitute, which is where lupanar comes from. Oddly enough, the she-wolf is also the revered symbol of Rome today and the emblem of its football team, which makes the whole idea feel infinitely less romantic.

3. The Colosseum, Rome

Most people know the Colosseum as a killing ground, but below the arena floor was the machinery that turned it into something close to an industrial slaughterhouse.

The hypogeum is a two-level warren of tunnels, cages, and lifting gear that Emperor Domitian began adding to the Colosseum about a year after it opened. Around 80 vertical shafts and a set of counterweighted wooden lifts, worked by teams of laborers in torchlight with little air and no daylight, could send a starved lion shooting up through a trapdoor into the middle of the arena in seconds.

Mornings were given over to animal hunts and middays to executions, when condemned prisoners were pushed out to be torn apart by those same ravenous beasts, the punishment the Romans called damnatio ad bestias.

4. The Via Appia and Capua

The Via Appia was the showpiece road of the Republic, a dead-straight ribbon of basalt running south from Rome. In the spring of 71 BC, it became the longest execution site in Roman history.

The story begins about 120 miles south in Capua, where a gladiator school kept men like Spartacus alive only as long as they were useful in the arena. Spartacus and around 70 others broke out using kitchen knives and spits, and within two years, the revolt had swollen into an army that kept embarrassing Rome over and over.

When Crassus finally crushed it, he made sure no one would ever forget who ruled whom. According to Appian, a prominent Greek historian who served as an official in ancient Rome, some 6,000 captured rebels were crucified at intervals along the whole road from Capua to Rome. They were left hanging as a warning to anyone else who got funny ideas about revolution.

5. Baiae, Bay of Naples

If Rome had a Las Vegas, it was Baiae, a seaside resort on the Bay of Naples where the wealthy went to misbehave well out of sight of the Senate. Moralists loathed it, and Seneca grumbled that it was a place where vice ran loose and a stay could wreck a respectable reputation. Much of the old resort has since slipped beneath the sea, dragged down over the centuries by the slow rise and fall of the volcanic ground in the area, so today you can snorkel or take a glass-bottomed boat over sunken mosaics and villa walls.

The dark story attached to Baiae is more of a family saga. It was near here, in 59 AD, that Nero is said to have tried to murder his own mother, Agrippina, with a booby-trapped boat rigged to come apart and sink her at sea. The contraption failed, Agrippina swam ashore, and Nero, having run out of patience with subtlety, simply sent men to finish the job in her villa.

Standing on the stunning shoreline today, with half a Roman party town glimmering under the water just offshore, it’s an oddly peaceful spot for somewhere with that on its record.

FYI, the marble statues scuba divers see on the seabed nowadays are copies. The originals were lifted to a museum and casts set back in their places, so the underwater park still has something to show.

6. The Amphitheater of El Djem (El Jem), Tunisia

Rome did not keep its blood culture at home, of course. The games traveled with the empire as it expanded, and nowhere is that clearer than in a small farming town in central Tunisia, where a stone amphitheater almost on the scale of the Colosseum rises straight out of the flat plain. This was Thysdrus, a place grown rich on the production of olive oil, and its arena could seat something like 35,000 people, roughly the entire population of the town.

A provincial city built one of the largest killing venues in the Roman world essentially to prove it belonged, and to give the locals the same spectacle of animal hunts and staged executions that drew the crowds in the capital.

Construction is usually dated to around 238 AD, the same year Thysdrus erupted in a tax revolt so violent that the mob killed the emperor’s local finance official and declared an elderly local landowner named Gordian emperor on the spot. That ad-lib reign lasted barely a few weeks before it collapsed, and it would seem the arena was never completed. It later doubled as a fortress, sheltering the townspeople during Vandal and Arab attacks, before generations of scavengers quarried it for building stone.

7. Villa Settefinestre, Tuscany

Most of the sites on this list are monuments. This one is a farm.

Villa Settefinestre sat in the rolling countryside near Cosa in southern Tuscany. When archaeologists dug it up in the late 1970s, it became the textbook example of the thing the marble version of Rome leaves out: the large agricultural estate run on slave labor that generated so much of the Republic’s wealth.

The villa belonged to the senatorial Volusii family, and it was built for profit rather than for show, with olive presses, wine cellars, a piggery, and quarters for a workforce that rarely, if ever, got to leave.

Andrea Carandini was tasked with the excavations, and he read the layout as a kind of familiar-looking plantation. He pointed to a block of small, windowless rooms as an ergastulum, the spartan barracks where one would keep chained field slaves at night after a day spent toiling the land under the whip. He compared it openly to the slave plantations of the American South, yet whether those particular rooms really were slave cells is now one of the longest-running arguments in Roman archaeology. Plenty of historians see the comparison as a bit of a stretch, but, knowing what we now know about the ancient Romans, it might not seem such a preposterous assumption.

For most of her life, the Mona Lisa was one semi-important portrait among many, admired by the odd Renaissance scholar but seemingly overlooked by nearly everyone else. Then a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with her under his coat in 1911, and the two-year manhunt that followed turned an unassuming little panel into the most famous face on Earth. Crowds have been chasing her ever since. But just a few steps away from the mob in the Salle des États are five of the museum’s masterpieces enjoying the kind of peace the Mona Lisa lost more than a century ago.

How to Beat the Crowds at the Louvre

The Louvre is quite the sprawling mammoth, set on former royal grounds. It only puts some 35,000 works on show at once, so nobody does it justice in a single day, try hard as they may. Push too hard, and all you end up being is exhausted and cranky in front of a painting behind glass, squeezed among a throng of folks.

The trick to avoid the drama is to skip the Denon wing scrum for your first hour and make for the Richelieu wing instead, which stays oddly uncrowded even at the height of summer. The museum also opens late on Friday evenings, and once the tour groups clear out, the marble halls turn blissfully empty. Pick three or four things you really want to see, then let yourself get pleasantly lost between them.

Note that the following five pieces are not secret, by any means, yet they are often sidelined, which makes seeking them out all the more rewarding.

1. The Five-Legged Lamassu of Khorsabad

Deep in the Richelieu wing, in a courtyard most people march straight through on their way to the Italian paintings, stand two giant winged bulls with bearded human faces. Look at one head-on, and it looks as if it’s planting itself on guard, yet step to the side, and it looks as if it’s striding forward. It’s a trick the sculptors pulled off by carving it with five legs instead of four, each one cut from just a single block of alabaster weighing close to 30 tons.

The pair once guarded the gates of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who grabbed the throne around 720 BC, probably as a usurper, and set out to prove the gods were on his side. His big move was building a whole new capital from scratch in under a decade, a city he modestly named Dur-Sharrukin, or Fortress of Sargon. He barely got to enjoy it, though, as he was killed in battle in 705 BC. Since his body was never recovered, his court took it as a sign the gods were not so approving after all. The omen spooked his son Sennacherib so badly that the young king abandoned the barely used city and moved the capital to Nineveh, leaving Sargon’s fortress to the wind.

You will find the pair today in Room 229, the Cour Khorsabad.

2. The Card Sharp in Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat

At first glance, The Cheat seems to show four ordinary people playing cards. Look again, and you have a sneaking suspicion you’ve just walked into a robbery. On the right, a richly dressed young man frowns at his hand, about to lose his shirt and completely oblivious. On the left, the card sharp is already sliding an ace of diamonds out from behind his belt.

Between them sit a courtesan and her maid, and here is the clever bit: you get the notion that everyone at that table is in on the scam except the victim. You can read the whole scheme in their eyes, the glances flicking between the three accomplices while the young man studies his hand. La Tour seems to suggest that cheating like this was so routine nobody needed to say a word.

Georges de La Tour was a star in his own lifetime, then slid so far out of view after he died in 1652 that scholars only pieced his story back together in the 20th century. This canvas helped a great deal. It surfaced in 1926 with a dealer on the Île Saint-Louis, signature still in the lower left, and hauled his reputation back from three centuries of darkness. Look for it in Room 912 of the Sully wing.

3. Vermeer’s Tiny Masterpiece: The Lacemaker

Vermeer is a household name today, but he had been reduced to something akin to a myth for nearly two centuries after his death. He worked slowly and rarely strayed from Delft, selling most of what he painted to a small circle of local buyers, so even in his lifetime his fame barely reached past his home town. Then came 1672, the year the Dutch still call the Rampjaar, or Disaster Year, when the armies of Louis XIV poured into the Republic and the art market collapsed along with the economy. Vermeer dealt in other painters’ work as well as making his own, and the crash ruined him. He died three years later at 43, woefully deep in debt, leaving his widow Catharina and their 11 surviving children, dealing with a long line of creditors banging at the door. To settle years of unpaid bills, she is said to have even handed the local baker two of her late husband’s paintings just so the family could eat.

For almost 200 years thereafter, the painter all but vanished from the record. Then a French critic named Théophile Thoré-Bürger became obsessed in the 1860s, hunting down the scattered canvases and publishing the research that pulled Vermeer back into the light.

The smallest masterpiece Vermeer ever painted is the one hanging at the Louvre that you ought to seek out. At about 24.5 by 21 centimeters, or roughly 9.6 by 8.3 inches, The Lacemaker is smaller than a sheet of paper, and its strange, almost photographic clarity probably owes something to a camera obscura, the lens-and-box device Vermeer seems to have used to study how light really falls, long before a camera could do the job for him.

4. The Sleeping Hermaphroditus and Bernini’s Marble Mattress

Stare at this reclining marble from one side, and you’ll see a beautiful woman asleep on her front. Walk around to the other side, however, and the body turns out to be both female and male, an astonishing bit of artistic sorcery. The figure is Hermaphroditus, child of Hermes and Aphrodite, who in the myth is fused with a besotted water nymph named Salmacis into a single body.

The sculpture is a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze, though the real highlight is what lies underneath. In 1620, Bernini, barely into his 20s, was paid 60 scudi to carve the mattress the figure rests on, and he made the stone look so plump and yielding, buttoned and dimpled under the weight of the sleeper, that you’ll probably be tempted to reach out and touch it to double-check.

The Borghese family clearly missed it once it was gone, because a second sleeping Hermaphroditus, fitted with its own carved marble mattress, soon took its place back in Rome. The Louvre’s original waits among the Roman antiquities.

5. Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds and That Conspiracy

Most of this painting’s fame rests on four words carved into the tomb, “Et in Arcadia ego.” The Latin is deliberately unfinished, so it works two ways. It can be Death speaking, “Even in Arcadia, I am here,” or the person in the tomb, saying they too once lived in this paradise. Either way, the conveyed message is the same: that however lovely the setting, death is already part of it. The phrase has never been found on any ancient text. Antiquarians in 17th-century Rome seem to have coined it, and it first appears in a 1618 Guercino painting. Art historians have puzzled over that small ambiguity ever since; Erwin Panofsky most famously of all.

Now, none of that is what made the painting famous with the public. From the mid-1900s, conspiracy theorists decided the tomb in the picture was a real one, standing in the south of France near a village called Rennes-le-Château, with a secret clue hidden in it by Poussin himself.

The wildest version, spread by The Da Vinci Code, said that clue pointed to the Holy Grail, reimagined as a hidden bloodline rather than a cup. Believers even found a roadside tomb near the village that looks a lot like the painted one! The snag is that it was built in 1903, and Poussin died in 1665, so if anything copied anything, the modern tomb copied the painting. You can judge the likeness yourself in front of the painting in the Louvre’s French galleries.

Around AD 150, a Greek named Pausanias set out on foot to describe his whole country and left what many call the first travel guide ever written. Read it now, and you’ll notice how the places he singled out 18 centuries ago, Acropolis included, are the same ones pulling the biggest crowds today. Venture past Athens, though, and Greece opens up like a historical atlas. The five sites in this guide run from Delphi, where Greeks came for prophecies, to Delos, an all-but-empty island treated as holy ground. Four filled his pages. The fifth he never reached.

But you can.

First, a Word on Exploring Greece Beyond Athens

Greece might be infamous for boasting some of the biggest tourist crowds in Europe, especially in summer. While this is true to some extent, it really only concerns Athens and some of the most famous islands, like Santorini. The country is expansive and bursting at the seams with UNESCO-listed archaeological sites, and no matter where you drive, you’ll come across a brown heritage sign pointing one out. The local joke is that nobody dares dig a basement pool, for fear of turning up something priceless and losing the land to the archaeologists.

I was absolutely amazed to have had Delphi to myself until mid-morning on my visit, which left me wondering how somewhere this important can stay so quiet. In reality, precious sites are so abundant that the country, outside the Acropolis, absorbs tourist crowds into near oblivion.

So do explore the five ancient Greek sites below and know that you’ll discover so many more along the way.

1. Delphi, Central Greece

For roughly a thousand years, Delphi was where the Greeks would come in search of answers as to what the future held. Kings and generals climbed the slopes of Mount Parnassus to put their questions to the Pythia, the priestess who spoke for Apollo, something they’d usually do before starting a war or founding a colony. The Greeks reckoned this was the center of the world, a spot Zeus had marked with a stone called the omphalos, or navel.

The catch was that the oracle dealt in riddles, which led to some “lost in translation” moments. When King Croesus of Lydia asked whether he should attack Persia, for example, he was told that if he did, he would destroy a great empire. Delighted to no end, onward he marched, only to discover that the great empire he was destined to destroy ended up being his own. Carved at the temple entrance was a sobering piece of advice he should have read first: “know thyself.”

The ruins climb the hillside in tiers, from the Temple of Apollo up to a theater and stadium with a spectacular view over a valley of olive trees. Come early, ahead of the Athens tour buses, and give yourself a couple of hours.

2. Theater of Epidaurus, The Peloponnese

Epidaurus is famous for its theater, but it was actually once a side attraction. It sat inside the Sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of medicine, and people came here sick, hoping to be cured. The treatment was mostly sleep, which sounds immensely reasonable.

Patients bedded down in a hall called the abaton and waited for the god to appear in a dream with a diagnosis, while non-venomous snakes sacred to Asclepius were left to glide through the wards. That snake, by the way, coiled around a staff, is the rod you still see on ambulances and pharmacy signs.

The theater appeared later and seats around 14,000 across 55 rows of limestone. Guides love to stand at the center and drop a coin to prove that a whisper carries to the back. The truth is a little less kitsch than the sales pitch. The limestone does filter out low background rumble and carry a raised voice unusually far, but an actual whisper could never reach row 55, and that hardly matters. The proportions and the peacefulness of the hills make it one of the loveliest ruins in the country. FYI: Search for “Ancient Theatre at the Asklepieion of Epidaurus” on Google Maps, or you might end up at its smaller namesake on the coast.

3. Olympia, The Western Peloponnese

The Olympic Games began at Olympia in 776 BC, and during the festival, the city-states were meant to lay down their weapons and travel in safety to honor Zeus. That was the idea, anyway, although the reality is written into a row of statue bases near the entrance to the stadium.

These were the Zanes: bronze statues of Zeus paid for with fines levied on athletes caught cheating, whether because they had taken bribes or fouled an opponent. Each base carried the offender’s name and his offense, placed so that every competitor had to pass this wall of shame on the way in, and spectators reportedly spat on them as they filed by.

The Temple of Zeus once held Phidias’s gold-and-ivory statue of the god, one of the Seven Wonders and long since lost. So, although you cannot see it, you can still walk onto the original stone starting line in the stadium and stand where the runners crouched, toes wedged into the grooves cut for grip. You can also, if you were so inclined, challenge your fellow travel companion to a 100m sprint. It is tradition, after all. Although…

Did you know? The ancient sprint was not 100 meters but the “stade,” one length of the track, which stretched about 192 meters (629 feet) and is where “stadium” comes from. For the first 13 Olympiads, it was the only race on the program. Now the fun part: competitors ran stark naked and lathered in olive oil (not sure if it was extra virgin or just the regular kind), and a false start earned a public flogging from the judges. You might want to mention that to your companion before you both toe the line.

4. Mycenae, The Argolid

Long before classical Athens, Mycenae was a Bronze Age fortress and, in Homer’s telling, the seat of Agamemnon, the very same who led the Greeks to Troy. You still enter through the Lion Gate, whose stones have been unnerving visitors for more than 3,000 years. Almost everything else about the place, funnily enough, comes wrapped in a wrong name.

When Heinrich Schliemann dug here in 1876, guided by his own copy of Pausanias, he pulled a gold funerary mask from a grave and decided on the spot it belonged to Agamemnon. He supposedly telegraphed that he had gazed upon the face of the king, a line that looks to be a later embellishment. The mask is real and truly magnificent, yet it predates any Agamemnon by some 300-400 years.

If you are based in Athens, you could potentially visit Mycenae and Epidaurus on one long but rewarding day trip. Buy your tickets to both online before heading off.

5. Delos, The Cyclades

A short boat ride from party-hard Mykonos lands you on Delos, its polar opposite in every way: windswept, uninhabited, and blissfully silent. The Greeks believed this was the birthplace of Apollo and his twin Artemis, which made it holy ground, and holy ground came with an abundance of rules. In 426 BC, Athens ordered the island purified, so every grave was dug up and bones shipped to a neighboring islet. From then on, no one was permitted to be born or to die on Delos. Expectant mothers and the dying were ferried off before either could happen.

The purity doubled as a cover for political control, and it did not stop Delos from later becoming a booming port and one of the ancient world’s biggest slave markets. What you can admire today is an entire open-air city of mosaic floors and roofless houses, watched over by the marble beasts of the Terrace of the Lions. The ones on site are copies, as most originals sit in the museum. And one, hauled off many moons ago, still guards the gate of the Venetian Arsenal.

Boats run from Mykonos most mornings, and you get a few hours on the island before the last one back. There is nowhere to stay the night, by ancient decree and modern practice alike. Head off on the first boat across because cruise line passengers and most other tourists coming from Mykonos don’t usually arrive before mid-morning. At the very least, you will have some peace for the first hour of your visit.