Musée des Beaux Arts

Set in the lavish, colonnaded Palais de Longchamp, Marseille’s oldest museum owes its existence to an 1801 decree of pre-Napoleonic France's short-lived Consulate, which established 15 museums across the country. A treasure trove of 16th- to 19th- century Italian and Provençal painting and sculpture, it's set in parkland popular with local families seeking shade in Marseille's treeless centre. The spectacular fountains, constructed in the 1860s, in part disguise the water tower at which the Roquefavour Aqueduct terminates.