The Swiss National Museum sits in a turreted neo-Gothic pile that looks like it was conjured from a fairy tale, tucked between Zurich's main train station and the Limmat river. Opened in 1898, it was purpose-built to house the young federal state's cultural inheritance — a deliberate act of nation-building at a time when Switzerland was still figuring out what it meant to be Swiss. That founding ambition still gives the place a particular gravity you don't always feel in national museums elsewhere.
Museum