Things to Do in Europe

Lyon's elegant Museum of Fine Art (Musee des Beaux Arts) is housed in a 17th-century palace that was designed for the Royal Abbess of the Dames de Saint Pierre and later remodeled to outrageous heights by Louis XIV.displays one of the finest collections in all France.

The lakeside medieval town of Lucerne is one of Switzerland’s prettiest destinations, well-deserving of a day’s exploration of its historic sites.  A picture-perfect town, its proud symbol is the 14th-century Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke) spanning Lake Lucerne, the beautiful, fourth-largest lake in Switzerland.

Chapel Bridge is 670 feet (204 meters) long and was built in 1333 to protect Lucerne from attacks. It’s the oldest wooden covered bridge in Europe. Seventeenth-century paintings line the interior, and the bridge leads to an eight-sided water tower, which has had a history as a prison, torture chamber, watchtower and treasury.

The half-timbered medieval buildings of Lucerne’s Old Town are surrounded by rampart walls and watchtowers. The town’s poignant sculpture of a dying lion is unforgettable, and its Picasso Museum is another must-see.

Though overshadowed by the ornate Basilica Notre Dame, the Romanesque-Gothic beauty of the Cathedrale St Jean is the more ancient and important of Lyon's lovely churches. At the heart of Old Lyon, it is the home of the Primatiale of the Gauls, supreme over all the archbishops of France. The title was granted in 1079, though it is now largely symbolic.

The angular facade, begun in 1175 and completed in 1476, opens onto a far more extravagant interior, with several soaring chapels, stained glass dating to the 1300s, and most famously, the 1598 astronomical clock. Saint John's most noted attraction can calculate religious dates (such as Easter) until 2019, as well as the positions of stars above Lyon. But you're really here to see it in motion, complete with mechanical bell ringers and roosters.

Opened in 2005, the Shoah Memorial, or Memorial de la Shoah, is a museum located in the Marais, Paris’ 4th arrondissement, dedicated to the 76,000 French Jews deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Honoring their memory through a series of poignant monuments and focusing on educating the public about the harrowing truths of the Holocaust, the museum is one of the country’s most moving tributes to its Jewish population.

Exhibits are centered around a number of memorials including the moving Wall of Names, a series of tall stone plinths listing the names and dates of French Jews lost in the war. The Crypt, a huge Star of David carved out of black marble, is a symbolic tomb for the millions of unburied Jews, containing ashes recovered from the concentration camps, and the heartrending Children’s Memorial showcases eerily lit photographs of some of the 11,000 children murdered. The strikingly effective installations are set against a permanent exhibition of artifacts, photographs and letters reclaimed from the camps, including video testimonies from the some of the 2,500 surviving French Jews, a library and a detailed history of anti-Semitic persecution.

Among the disturbing accounts though, there remains an optimistic outlook, with the focus finally shifting to the recovery of France’s Jewish community and modern day society, and the Memorial mission proclaimed as ‘Understanding the past to brighten the future’.

Primarily associated with the steady gaze of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa, Paris' Louvre museum is home to a 35,000-strong collection of paintings and sculptures considered one of the greatest in the world. The contemporary glass Louvre Pyramid heralds the museum's entrance, which millions of tourists flock to every year to feast their eyes on masterpieces that span from antiquity to the 20th century.