10 Outstanding Museums and Galleries Around Europe

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By Google Arts & Culture

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All around Europe you can find incredible museums and art galleries that celebrate its diverse cultural heritage: from ancient history and archaeological sites, to science, nature and art. So take a virtual tour with us of some of these places that are helping people discover, engage with and explore the culture around us.

The Uffizi Gallery, Italy

Florence's Uffizi Gallery is the legacy of the art collection of city's ruling house of Medici. The U-shaped building contains works by Renaissance Old Masters such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli and Titian. The building was originally constructed to house the administrative and judiciary offices—"uffizi" means offices in Italian.

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The Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands

The Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world, as well as exhibiting the work of his contemporaries, such as Georges Seurat, Édouard Manet and Paul Signac. Some of the famous works amongst the 200 van Gogh paintings include Sunflowers and Almond Blossoms.

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Musée d'Orsay, France

Once a Beaux-Arts railway station on the bank of the Seine, the Musée d'Orsay is now one of the largest art museums in Europe. Take a virtual tour of the impressive art-nouveau building and you can admire a vast array of French art from 1848 to 1914, including masterpieces by Monet, Cézanne and Gauguin.

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Natural History Musuem, England

London's Natural History Museum is home to over 80 million specimens from around the world, including samples collected by naturalist Charles Darwin on his travels. Its top specimens include an eight-meter-long giant squid and the bones of a bottlenose whale that got lost in the Thames in 2006. Don't forget to look up to check out the impressive ceiling of the Hintze Hall.

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Oceanographic Museum, Germany

As well as hosting numerous exhibits about fishing, the environment and marine conservation, the German Oceanographic Museum in Stralsund is home to 7,000 animals—including a family of ten Humboldt penguins who live on its roof. It has 36 aquariums in total, including a 35,000 liter turtle pool.

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The National Museum, Poland

Warsaw's National Museum includes a wide collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, as well as Polish paintings from the 16th century to present day by leading artists like Chełmoński and Matejko. During World War II, the museum was looted by the Nazis and to this day over 5,000 artifacts are still missing.

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The Acropolis Museum, Greece

The Acropolis Museum houses every antiquity from the Acropolis of Athens, an ancient citadel that was inhabited as far back as 4,000 BCE. Located only 280 meters from the remains of the Parthenon, the modernist building includes objects from the Greek Bronze Age to Roman and Byzantine Greece.

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National Museum of Denmark, Denmark

Copenhagen's National Museum of Denmark covers 14,000 years of Danish history, as well as exhibits from around the world. One of it's most notable artifacts is the Egtved girl coffin—the hollow tree trunk that was found in 1921 containing the remains of a teenage girl from around 1370 BCE.

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Kunsthistorisches Museum, Austria

The Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Fine Arts) in Vienna, identifiable by its 60m-high octagonal dome, was built to find a home for the extensive art collection of the royal House of Habsburg. It is the largest art musuem in Austria and contains works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Tintoretto and Dürer.

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Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain

Opened in 1997, the Frank-Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is one of the largest museums in Spain. Its 19 galleries are home to many contemporary large-scale, site-specific works and installations, including The Matter of Time—a series of weathering steel sculptures by Richard Serra.

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Credits: All media

The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.

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