Musée d'Orsay

Built as the Gare d'Orsay for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, this grand Beaux-Arts railway station on the Seine was the first electrified urban terminus in the world. But its platforms proved too short for modern trains, and by 1939 it was largely obsolete; Orson Welles filmed The Trial in its abandoned halls in 1962, and it narrowly escaped demolition. In 1986 it reopened as the Musée d'Orsay, dedicated to art from 1848 to 1914 and holding the world's largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces—Manet's Olympia, Van Gogh's self-portraits, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne—beneath the giant glass clock of the former station. The soaring iron-and-glass nave remains part of the spectacle.