You could spend a lifetime in Europe’s grand museums — the Louvre, the British Museum, and many others. But I also like to take in a destination’s more idiosyncratic sights, getting a bead on the quirkier side of the local culture. It’s my nature as a travel writer to look for the rustic, old-fashioned, and odd bits that fall through the cracks.
During a recent trip to Madrid, I went to Casita Museo de Raton Perez, a tiny museum busy with enthralled and wide-eyed kids, who came to meet a mystical little mouse. Raton Perez, a kind of four-legged tooth fairy, gives candies to Spanish kids when they lose a tooth and put it under their pillow. There was ample evidence of the mouse everywhere in the museum — including a six-inch-tall bronze statue in the lobby — but the magical rodent himself was nowhere to be found.
Prague’s Toy Museum (Muzeum Hracek), with an entire floor devoted to the Barbie doll, is another place that sounds silly but is actually great. After touring the exhausting Prague Castle (and just past its exit gate), it’s a refreshingly light attraction — a vast collection of all things Barbie, dating back to 1959, with social commentary. Looking at the buxom first-edition figure, you can understand why these sirens of capitalist discontent that objectified women’s bodies weren’t allowed here until 1989.
Less lighthearted — but no less interesting — is Vienna’s Third Man Museum, dedicated to the classic film set in 1949, when the city was divided, like Berlin, between the four victorious Allies: U.S., France, Britain and Russia. The movie still plays in Vienna a few times a week; the museum is open only on Saturday afternoons. “Third Man” fans will love the movie relics, but even if you are just interested in Vienna at the start of the Cold War, it’s worthwhile. Sections cover the 1930s when Austria was ripe for the Anschluss, the reality of 1.7 million “DPs” (displaced persons) in Austria after the war, the challenges of denazification after 1945, and candid interviews with soldiers. You’ll also get a fascinating look at moviemaking and marketing circa 1950.
For a look at history through fashion — specifically, shoes — head for the little Shoe Museum (Museu del Calcat) in Barcelona. There you’ll find footwear from the 1700s to today, from fancy ladies’ boots to expeditionary boots that have been to Mount Everest. The huge shoes at the entry are designed to fit the foot of the Columbus Monument at the bottom of the city’s tourist-filled pedestrian thoroughfare, the Ramblas.
More history is explored through Peter the Great’s personal collection of scientific oddities in the oldest museum in St. Petersburg: the Kunstkamera. Three hundred years ago, Czar Peter I became Peter the Great because of his huge personality — he was a traveler, city planner, warrior, scientist and the westernizer of Russia. The Kunstkamera includes his freak show — typical of the period — of all kinds of human and animal deformities preserved in jars. Not for the faint of heart, this might be Europe’s most offbeat — and nauseating — sight. While many tourists dismiss the Kunstkamera as a “museum of curiosities,” locals are proud of its scientific tradition.
In the Italian Alps village of Castelrotto (Kastelruth), citizens are proud of the folk-singing group Kastelruther Spatzen, a gang of local boys known as “the ABBA of the Alps.” (The lead singer, Norbert, is a Germanic heartthrob on par with Tom Jones.) In the basement of the Kastelruther Spatzenladen shop is a homespun little museum devoted to the singers, slathered with gifts, awards, and gold records. The group has won 13 Echo Awards — “more than Robbie Williams,” according to the museum. You can watch a continuously playing video of these idols to see if you’re ready to join their legions of fans.
(C) 2014 Rick Steves, distributed by Tribune Content Agency, llc
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