Alsatian Museum

This guide to the Alsatian Museum in Strasbourg traces its founding in 1902, when a group of Alsatian citizens pooled their own money to preserve everyday life under German rule, stitching three old half-timbered houses on the Ill into a maze of rooms filled with kitchens, folk costumes and farm tools. It follows the museum into the First World War, when German authorities judged it too French in spirit, placed it under sequestration in 1917 and scheduled its collections for sale. Its founders faced watching fifteen years of collecting scattered to private buyers. Wander the crooked staircases slowly; the museum still occupies all three original houses.