Best Practices for Visiting Landmark Museums

The gorgeous “small” clock on the interior of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France. Stunning. August 16, 2022.

When you visit a major international city—think world capitals or major tourist destinations, such as New York City, Paris, London, and Tokyo—you’ll find that they all have large museums focused on the country or region’s history, art, culture, military, and so on.

Even if you’re not a museum fan—I’ll go to museums any day, as I love museums, though I know many people who would not because they do not—seeing at least a couple of the major museums when visiting a major destination makes a lot of sense.

For example, even if you don’t adore art, you shouldn’t pass on a visit to the Louvre when in Paris. And even if history isn’t your thing, I don’t think anyone should skip at least a single visit to one or more of The Smithsonian Institution museums when in Washington, D.C.

Yet even a major museum fan can get overwhelmed in these massive world-stage museums. The Louvre spans 782,910 square feet and features nearly 40,000 objects. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, has a permanent collection holding more than 2 million items.

These museums cover their subjects with a numbing level of completeness. You really see and appreciate everything on one visit. If you try, you’ll have a miserable experience.

After having visited a lot of museums in a lot of places across the globe, I’ve developed a few different strategies for approaching these landmark institutions that I hope could help other people have a better experience than they might have otherwise—or an experience at all, if they’d otherwise shy away.

Take these tips and use them individually or in combination, depending on your situation and what’s available at the destination during your trip.

Get a Qualified Guide for Your Visit

The best way to experience a museum of any size—and especially the massive ones—is via an expert tour guide who can give you the context and the highlights (in general or on a specific piece of the collection).

How can you find a guide to a museum?

If a museum offers guided tours directly, go this route whenever possible. They will have guided tours listed on their websites.

If the museum doesn’t directly offer guided tours, your next best bet is to call the city’s tourist office. The official tourist bureau may offer tours of landmark museums with qualified guides. If not, they often have lists of official guides available for private hire. Vetted (and sometimes licensed) guides will always give you the best experience—and information.

If the tourist office doesn’t have someone to offer, research guides available through third-party travel operators if you search the web for “guided tour of XYZ.” Many on-line travel guides, such as AirBNB Experiences and Travelocity, allow guides to list tours that you can book through the guide’s site. You can also do a straight-up web search for “guide XYZ” and find independent guides who gives tours of major sites, especially landmark locations in major tourist areas. Universities in the area also sometimes can connect you with a professor or graduate student in the area of interest, so you might want to give that a try.

Official tourist operators tend to have better guides giving their tours than the independent, freelance operators posting guided tours for booking via sites like Travelocity and AirBNB Experiences; I’ve had solidly hit-and-miss experiences with freelance guides offering tours.

Freelance guides do not need any official certification and don’t go through any vetting, so you can easily get someone who doesn’t have much experience giving engaging tours—or who doesn’t know the material. If an independent guide is your only option, I have had better luck with freelance guides who have their own websites (rather than simple listings on other sites), as they tend to be more professional and serious about the work.

Get a List of the Museum’s Highlights

The museum’s website, your travel guidebook, third-party websites (such as blogs like this one!), the city’s tourist office, and the museum’s visitor ticket office or information kiosk can give you recommendations for the museum’s must-see items.

Go to the museum’s website first for a list of the most important pieces in the collection. Second—especially if the museum’s website doesn’t have an “unmissables” section—check out your travel guidebook for the museum’s listing, as it will always outline the highlights. Both places will give you a tiny bit of context as to why each item on the list has significance.

If you turn up empty-handed after visiting the museum’s website and you don’t have a guidebook, your next best bet is the city’s official tourist bureau, followed by websites and blogs and other on-line research.

Ideally, you’ll arrive at the museum with the must-see list, but if you don’t have it, ask the visitor kiosk or welcome desk for a list of the must-sees. They typically have a brochure with the list.

Get Your Bearings in the Museum Lobby

I’ve made the mistake of heading straight into the museum collections after buying my ticket—not taking the brochure, not looking at the lobby’s museum maps, not asking any questions.

Bad idea!

Landmark museums—especially the national-importance ones—are immense and often “begin at the beginning.” For example, the Musée Carnavalet in Paris covers the history of Paris—and it is amazing. However, the museum really does cover the history of Paris: It starts with the first human settlements on the site of the current city back in prehistoric times and takes you all the way through the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the current Republic.

That’s… a lot.

Although I enjoyed immensely learning about prehistoric and early Paris, by the time I got to the Middle Ages, I’d completely fatigued my attention span. I wandered through the rest of the museum but didn’t take it in with the same level of attention. I knew I’d need to come back to redo the second half. The good news: I loved the museum and a return visit appealed. Nevertheless, if I’d thought ahead, I’d have parceled out my time to focus on the historical areas of the greatest interest to me from the start.

Lesson learned: We only have so much energy, attention span, and time for any activity. When tackling these major museums, the best approach is one that carves up their contents into interest areas and allows you to expend your freshest focus there, leaving the other parts for a lighter visit. You’ll still have “happy accidents,” where you discover a theme you didn’t know would interest you, but you won’t have missed the museum parts that you knew interested you from the get-go.

Though nowhere near as enticing as the art inside the museum, the Pinacoteca di Brera’s lobby has a map outlining where to find what categories of the collection, along with a text guide for how to approach the museum. Stopping at it before entering saved my energy for seeing the art I’d specifically gone there to see. Milan, Italy. November 26, 2022.

For example, you may want to visit all the museum’s highlights (the “must-sees”) and then head back to spend concentrated time on a certain theme (e.g., epoch, subject area), so that you can really process what the museum presents on that subject. You can then spend your remaining time and energy in the other areas—where you might find topics of interest for another visit in the future.

Alas, as much as you may want to see the whole museum, unless you can visit it over multiple days or visits because you live in town or visit the city often, you’ll have a better experience if you take it in pieces based on priority of interest to you.

Otherwise, you overwhelm yourself and end up not appreciating any of it.

Get Multiday Tickets

I wish more museums offered tickets that allowed visitors access over more than one day! A few do, though not enough.

If you have the time and really have an interest in the subject, multiday tickets can make a huge difference to your major-museum experience. Check the museum’s website to see if you can buy multiday tickets. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City offers tickets that allow access over a three-day period, which I adore. I buy a ticket, do as much of the museum as can sink in (and as I have time to do in that moment), and then come back over the following days to dip into subject areas of interest with the time available.

Even the most interested person can’t process all the information in a massive museum in one go, even with a full day.

You Simply Cannot Skip Some Museums!

I tend to love the medium-sized and small museums, often on quirky and off-beat topics, as much or more than I enjoy the massive, landmark institutions—mainly because the more niche museums feel human-sized and accessible in a way that a huge, comprehensive museum simply cannot.

That said, I still value immensely the landmark museums I’ve had the chance to visit and highly recommend you see them as well—even if you don’t consider yourself a museum lover!