Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva)

Geneva's largest museum, the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire is a sweeping encyclopedic collection that ranges from prehistory to the twentieth century under one monumental roof. It sits on the edge of the old town, a short climb from the lakefront, and forms the centrepiece of the city's cultural institutions.

The building opened in 1910, designed by Marc Camoletti in a grand Beaux-Arts style, its four wings arranged around a central courtyard. The scale reflects the ambition of a wealthy, cosmopolitan city to gather the arts and history of civilisation in a single place, and the collections number in the hundreds of thousands of objects.

The holdings are remarkably broad. Archaeology covers Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Rome, alongside prehistoric and early Swiss material. The applied arts include arms and armour, furniture, silver and Geneva's celebrated tradition of watchmaking and enamels. The fine art galleries hang European painting from the medieval period to modern times, with a famous altarpiece panel by Konrad Witz depicting Christ walking on the water of Lake Geneva, one of the earliest recognisable landscapes in Western art, and works by Hodler, Corot, Rodin and the Impressionists.

The permanent collection is free to enter, a generous policy that makes the museum easy to dip into, with charges only for temporary exhibitions. It stands near the cathedral, the Reformation Wall and the old town's lanes, so it slots naturally into a day of sightseeing on the higher ground above the lake. For its combination of range, depth and setting, it is the essential museum of Geneva and a rich introduction to both Swiss and European art and history.