Historical Museum Frankfurt

This guide to the Historical Museum Frankfurt centers on a small silver medal from 1817, stamped on one side with a woman in flowing robes and on the other with a list of grocery prices, struck during a famine nobody in the city understood at the time. It follows a museum curator's years of digging into what actually caused the shortage, and the museum's much older habit of keeping score through money, from a 1749 gift of ancient coins to a hoard that now runs past 150,000 pieces. Take a slow look through the medal cases, each one holds its own small piece of the city's accounting.