Every city has its little, uncrowded museums offering special
pleasures to the initiated. In Paris, there’s the Musée Dapper,
with its superb exhibitions of African art, hidden behind a bourgeois
apartment house. In London, there are Sir John Soane’s Museum,
in Holborn, a marriage
of rationalism and idiosyncracy, and the
Soane-designed Dulwich Picture Gallery, in the depths of SE 21, a
rare combination of marvelous paintings and innovative
architecture; each of them is celebrated in its way, but so
sparsely visited that I tend to think of them as private
treasures. In London, too, I’m partial to the Sigmund
Freud Museum: the house where he lived and worked for the last year of
his life, a slice of Mitteleuropa transplanted from Vienna to a
quiet Hampstead street—library, antiquities, and all,
including, of course, the famous desk and couch. What may be the
ultimate obscure attraction—another favorite—is to be
found in Venice, near the furthest end of the Fondamente Nuove:
a cycle of splendid frescos by Palma Giovane in the tiny Oratorio
dei Crociferi, which is open only between April and October,
three days a week for a couple of hours, either morning or
afternoon, depending.

New York has its share of such quirky, even cranky, institutions.
There’s the Dahesh Museum, a shrine to academic exoticism, and a
truly bizarre institution on the Upper West Side, with a
permanent exhibition of the works of Nicholas Roerich, known to
balletomanes as the designer of the sets and costumes for
the