Museum of Cultures, Museum der Kulturen, Basel, Switzerland Having realised that I’d not written about the Museum of Ancient Art, I also realised that I’d not written about the excellent Museum of Cultures. Silly me. The museum has its origins in the 1840s, when artworks and artefacts collected by travellers and merchants were donated to the city. Over the years,…
Sun, Moon and Stars Exhibition, Museum of Culture, Basel, Switzerland The excellent Museum of Culture regularly holds exhibitions which help to highlight certain themes within its collection. When I visited, they had an interesting exhibition which looked at the way the universe shapes people on earth – from the way we create calendars, to the gods we worship. Because of the…
Ethnographic Museum, Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden What is interesting about going to Ethnographic Museums in different countries is that they all have a slightly different emphasis: some, like the Museum of Culture in Basel, have a lot of objects from Papua New Guinea; the Ethnographic Museum in Zurich has an extraordinary Chinese collection. Each reflects the interests of the people…
Ethnographic Museum, Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland You never quite know what you’re going to get with museums in Switzerland. Sometimes they are surprisingly fascinating. Sometimes they’re pretty good. Very rarely are they without any redeeming features, especially if they’re about ethnology. I think it’s probably a bit mean to say that there were no redeeming features in Neuchatel’s…
Mirabilis Exhibition at the Popes’ Palace, Avignon Staged in a grand hall in the Popes’ Palace in 2018 was an exhibition which highlighted the treasures found across Avignon’s five main museums and galleries: the Petit Palais, Calvet, Requien, Roure and Lapidaire. What made it rather special was the fact that it was curated by Christian Lacroix. Despite the fact that…
The Maritime Museum, Museu de Marinha, Lisbon, Portugal Portugal has such an awesome maritime history that I was really looking forward to visiting the museum dedicated to it. Situated in the western wing of the Jerónimos Monastery down at Belém, the setting also seemed pretty perfect for learning more about the amazing Portuguese explorers of the past. In fact, the history of…