Museu do Ipiranga

This guide to the Museu do Ipiranga in São Paulo starts with children shrieking through the fountains of a garden that was built to be admired, not played in. It traces the museum back to 1895, when it rose as a solemn monument on the spot where legend says a Portuguese prince declared Brazil's independence, and to the Belgian landscape architect hired a decade later to lay out its stiff, formal French garden. The garden's straight sightlines and clipped hedges were built for stiff Sunday promenades in stiff Sunday clothes. Best seen from the top of the garden stairs, looking down toward the fountains.