The British Museum, London
The collection is strongest in the ancient world: Egyptian mummies and sculpture, Assyrian palace reliefs, and Greek and Roman art, alongside major Asian and African holdings. Its signature treasures are the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, and the Assyrian lion hunt reliefs from Nineveh.
The world's first national public museum, and the permanent collection is free. The Great Court sits at the center of the building, which makes the huge galleries easy to navigate.
This is a museum I can never see enough of. I keep coming back, again and again, and every time I discover more: the Admonitions Scroll on one of its rare appearances, the Dunhuang cave paintings, or something else entirely. There is simply too much here. And the collection keeps growing, from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial treasures, among the greatest early-medieval finds ever made in Britain, to a whole moai from Easter Island. For all its size, the museum is run beautifully. However big the crowds, the pleasure of looking never suffers.