Museu da República (Palácio do Catete)

This guide to the Museu da Republica in Rio de Janeiro's Palacio do Catete opens with the palace's origins in coffee and the transatlantic slave trade: the fortune of Antonio Clemente Pinto, Baron of Nova Friburgo, reputedly the richest man in the Brazilian empire, who built a Venetian-style palace and commissioned a grand banquet table in France for his dinners. It follows that same table decades later, after the palace became the seat of the republic, to the night President Getulio Vargas's government held its final meeting around it. Upstairs, near a plain bedroom, sits a striking contrast to the gilded rooms below.