Brussels Royal Palace

This guide to the Brussels Royal Palace traces an unlikely path from the street-food stalls of Bangkok, where jewel beetles are eaten by the thousands and their iridescent wing cases thrown away, to Queen Paola's request that artist Jan Fabre do something with them. It follows Fabre and a team of about thirty assistants gluing those discarded wings across the ceiling of the palace's Mirror Room, finished in 2002. Look up while standing beneath it, ideally during the palace's brief summer opening after the national holiday.