Germany Guide
Saxony
The Grassi museums
Address: Corner of Täubchenweg and Prager Strasse
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–6pm
Price: €4 or €5 each; combination ticket €12
Website: www.grassimuseum.de
The doyenne of city museums is the three collections of Museen im Grassi, presented in their entirety since 2008 following a six-year renovation of the complex. By far the finest museum is the two-millennia display of decorative arts in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts). Refurbishment has brought innovative presentation to one of the richest collections of its type in Europe, ordered within permanent exhibitions themed as "Antiques to Historicism", "Asian Art" and "Art Nouveau to the present". You could lose several hours among over two thousand objects on display: starting at early Roman items, browsing through the treasures of the Leipzig council, and lingering in highlights such as a cabinet room of Italian Renaissance majolica ceramics or the so-called Roman Hall, whose panels of painted ruins – the Romantic concept of beauty through decay – were rescued from a now-demolished palace near Leipzig, Schloss Eythla. Modern objects include works by the big guns of twentieth-century design such as Mies van der Rohe. The opposite wing of the complex houses the Museum für Völkerkunde (Musem of Ethnology), whose displays roam across Asia, Africa, America, Australia and Oceania – if you're pushed for time, make a beeline for Northeast Asia with one of only nine Kurile-Ainu feather dresses in the world, an eye-catching village complex built by craftsmen from the Gujarat region of India, or a North African Bedouin tent. The five thousand instruments on show in the Museum für Musikinstrumente, among them what is said to be the world's oldest piano (1726), is small beer by comparison even if a "sound laboratory" entertains.