Two more reasons to visit Paris

Two of Paris’s historical museums, the Musée Rodin and the Musée de l’Homme, have recently reopened after major makeovers. 

The elegant 18th-century mansion housing the work and collection of the universally revered sculptor Auguste Rodin looks much the same after three years of work, but every part of the building has been meticulously restored or buffed, painted, and polished. The structure itself has been shored up to support sculptures weighing up to 2.5 tons (the marble version of “The Kiss”), and many of his plaster casts have been taken out of storage and put on display to illustrate his working process. 

The Musée de l’Homme, meanwhile, has changed entirely—which is not surprising, since most of its ethnographic collection of non-Western art and artifacts was moved across the Seine to the Musée du Quai Branly when it opened 10 years ago. Now the Musée de l’Homme has been brought into the 21st century with lots of interactive displays and a focus on evolution and conservation. Innovative exhibits include a wall of tongues that, when pulled upon, speak in one of the world’s 7,000 languages—everything from Yoruba to Tagalog to Yiddish—and a photo booth where you can discover what you would have looked like as a Neanderthal.