World Museum

The World Museum, opened in 1853, is the oldest museum facility in the city, which has more than 1.7 million exhibits from around the world in its collection. The most important exhibitions present Roman sculpture (the largest, after the British Museum, collection in Great Britain), art and culture of ancient Egypt and Nubia (16,000 objects, including mummies and one of the most valuable exhibits in the world - the belt of Pharaoh Ramses), items from excavations in Cyprus and an exhibition documenting the destruction of the museum during World War II.

The World Museum also offers a visit to the planetarium, a visit to the aquarium or a zoological exhibition, which presents over a million animals (vertebrates and invertebrates) and an exhibition devoted to chronometry, which gathered 12,000 exhibits related to measuring time. The facility also has a wide range of attractions for the youngest visitors, including the little explorer's pavilion and Bug House, where giant insect models are presented.

An interesting contribution to the history of museology, and especially Egyptology, were the cases from 1890, when the World Museum sold, for fertilizer, almost 20 tons of cat mummies. In ancient Egypt, cat mummies were a regular part of burials - hundreds of thousands of embalmed cats were found during archaeological research.