Diamond Museum

This guide to the Diamond Museum in Bruges opens with an inconvenient fact: a diamond cut into a symmetrical pear shape shows up in a Vienna goblet dated 1467, nine years before Bruges goldsmith Lodewyk van Bercken supposedly invented that same technique in 1476. You'll hear how van Bercken became credited as the father of modern diamond cutting for the scaif, a spinning wheel loaded with olive oil and diamond dust, and how that legend traces back to a single seventeenth-century writer claiming him as an ancestor. Time your visit for a quarter past noon, when a polisher works a wheel built on the same principle.