Lists of Travel Lists; Top Museums, Hotels

Do you like museums? I don’t. Do you love wandering the rich halls of a famous museum while traveling? Most people do. I don’t.

Well, maybe that’s too harsh. Mostly, I don’t. I know that risks making me sound like a Philistine (“Art & Pottery Shards, Philistine Era. Gallery XXVII”) but sometimes I think of museums as huge vampires, draining the too-short time out of a visit to a strange and fascinating city. I go to the museums, of course, because they are so interesting and important and I’d be a dope not to. But often I resent it. I grumble at losing time in Florence looking at French paintings, missing chances to see more of France because I am looking at Italian paintings in Paris.

Of course, if that’s the worst travel problem I ever have I’m pretty lucky but, even recently, I got lost in the halls of a great museum in Vienna and saw too little of that imperial town as a result.

This is all sparked by a list put up by the nifty folks at Fodor’s of what they cite as the “11 European Museums You Should See In Your Lifetime.”

With more museums in Europe than there are trees in Canada, they chose:

* The Louvre, Paris

* Museum Island, Berlin

* The British Museum, London

* The Book of Kells, Dublin

* The Vatican museums

* Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

* Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

* Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

* The Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen

* The Guggenheim, Bilbao

* Museo del Prado, Madrid

Of course, any such list is likely to challenge a visitor’s own favorites. And, accordingly, people write in to wonder how on earth they could leave out the Hermitage in St. Petersburg or the Parthenon Museum in Athens or Villa Borghese in Rome … and so many others. But that, of course, is part of the game of lists.

Umberto Eco, in a fascinating interview with Der Spiegel headlined, “We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die” makes a thoughtful case for lists and their vitality in our essence and all that. Me, I like lists simply because they are so preposterously fun to read. And think about.

The gang at Fodor’s also recently listed what they feel are the top seven hotels in London and Paris. They are:

* Claridge’s in London

* Hotel Rafael, Paris

* The Dorchester, London

* Four Seasons Hôtel George V Paris, Paris

* Ritz Hotel, Paris

* The Connaught, London

* Brown’s, London

I don’t imagine I will ever have enough money to spend a second at such places as these, costing as much for a night as the plane fare to get there as they do. But it’s fun to read about them — and the comments of other travelers with their own choices.

There are even Lists of Lists:

For the Twitter addicts, here are what Jaunted.com calls and how they describe, “Our Five Favorite Twitter Travel Lists Right Now…”

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