Renowned architect Renzo Piano said it best. “A museum is a place where one should lose one’s head.”

Here at R. Crusoe & Son, we’d like to share with you a list of our most favorite museums around the globe. These are places that allow us to “lose our heads” by adding to, and enhancing, the destination countries in which they stand, or by illustrating a nation’s collective traditions, values, and interests.

There are the obvious treasuries of art and artifacts—the Louvre, the British Museum, the Vatican Museums. And we do love visiting them. But the following have collections that we adore for their ability to spotlight the uniqueness of their home countries and cities.

Shanghai Museum. Shanghai, China. Welcome to the world’s greatest collection of ancient Chinese art displayed in 10 sections: Chinese bronzes, sculpture, ceramics, jades, seals, calligraphy, coins and currency, paintings, Ming and Qing dynasty furniture (the height of Chinese furniture design), and traditional crafts of China’s minority peoples. Opened in 1996, the building was designed by a local architect to mimic the shape of an ancient bronze cooking vessel called a ding.

Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. Cairo, Egypt. Extraordinary relics await within—including the famous gold death mask of Tutankhamun, which is no longer allowed to leave Egypt. Many of the objects were collected by Auguste Mariette, a French archaeologist who excavated the temples of Amun, Edfu, Dendera, and Deir al-Bahari. Use the artifacts, from 2700 B.C. to the sixth century A.D., to follow successive dynasties and pharaohs. Statues, jewels, and, of course, mummies illuminate Egypt’s incredibly rich history. We especially love not only the original Royal Mummies Hall, but also the newer hall, with mummies and remains from the Late New Kingdom through the Third Intermediate Period.

Museum Island. Berlin, Germany. No visit to Berlin is complete without time on Museum Island, commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1830. The island, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is actually a compendium of five museums (so leave yourself plenty of time). The Alte Nationalgalerie has perhaps the world’s finest collection of 19th-century German sculpture and painting. The Altes Museum, with ancient Greek and Roman artifacts, was designed by Berlin’s greatest architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to resemble a Corinthian temple. The Bode Museum, reopened after a 10-year renovation, exhibits sculptures, one of the world’s great coin collections, and a selection of fine paintings. We love the Neues Museum for its prehistoric, early, and Egyptian art. The most famous piece here? The exquisite bust of Nefertiti. Finally, the monumental Pergamon Museum, whose Greek and Babylonian art, including the Ishtar Gate and the Pergamon Alter, is unmatched.

Uffizi Gallery. Florence, Italy. One of the Western world’s oldest museums. The riches here are eye-popping. Highlights? Da Vinci’s “The Annunciation” and “The Adoration of the Magi;” Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus;” Michelangelo’s “Doni Madonna;” and Rembrandt’s “Self Portrait as a Young Man,” “Self Portrait as an Old Man,” and “Portrait of an Old Man.” And remember that R. Crusoe gets you into the Uffizi with prior reservations, so there’s no waiting on endless lines. Imagine that.

Miho Museum. Kyoto, Japan. A joint Japanese and American project designed by I. M. Pei that opened in 1996. The Miho is an example of a museum whose architecture is as significant as the collections within. Pei endeavored to create a space with absolutely optimum conditions for the exhibition of art. The museum houses the wonderful private collection of Asian and Western antiques amassed by Japanese heiress Mihoko Koyama.

Hermitage Museum. St. Petersburg, Russia. Catherine the Great originally built the Hermitage as her private apartments, a place for retreat, reflection, and seclusion. Between 1764 and 1775, she undertook to acquire some of the world’s finest works of art, and she succeeded to an almost incomprehensible degree. Today, the Hermitage is among the world’s leading paintings galleries and a treasure trove of ancient artifacts. The Gold Room exhibits the largest collection of family treasures amassed by the ruling Romanovs. Look around you as you wander these halls, and you’ll understand as you never did before exactly why the Russian Revolution took place. The pieces were gathered between the 17th century and the final days of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra.

Jewish Museum. Berlin, Germany. A quarter century in the planning, and designed by architect Daniel Libeskind, the Jewish Museum depicts the history and significance of German Jews through time. Libeskind explains the building’s jagged, irregular shape. “I have chosen to call it ‘Between the Lines…’ because it is about two lines of thinking… One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a torturous line but continues indefinitely. [Its shape] is a reference to the emblematics of a compressed and distorted Star [of David], the yellow star so frequently worn on this very site.” His design connects locations of historic events with locations of Jewish culture in Berlin. He also uses the concepts of absence, emptiness, and the invisible—expressions of the disappearance of Jews. Angled sequences through the building orchestrate visitors’ path and allow them to see (but not to enter) certain empty rooms, which Libeskind calls “voided voids.” A must-see, in our book.

Musée D'Orsay. Paris, France. In the center of Paris, on the banks of the Seine. The museum was installed in the former Orsay railway station, finished in 1900. The building itself is essentially the museum’s first work of art. Others capture movements in the art world from 1848 to 1914—in paintings, sculpture, objets d’art, photography, the graphic arts, and architecture.