Fodor's Expert Review DIVA
The city's diamond trading and smithing past gets a gloriously theatrical presentation in this interactive museum. Visitors are guided through six rooms by their audio "butler" Jerome, gawking at some rampant abuses of wealth, from a diamond-encrusted gold tennis racket to a king's ransom of jewels, silverware, and chinoiserie. Ensconced in all this glitz, however, is a serious history lesson in how a city was built on its ability to turn rough stones into polished jewels, as well as the fads that accompanied the industry, such as the "Egyptmania," fanned by Napoléon's campaigns in the late 18th century, or Japan's opening up to the West in the mid-1800s, enabling its aesthetic to influence everything from Art Nouveau to a sudden bourgeois craze for kimonos.
