Peggy Guggenheim Collection

This guide to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice opens in Paris in 1940, when an American collector raced to buy modern art before the Nazis could brand it degenerate and seize it, smuggling Picassos, Mirós and Mondrians south as she fled the invasion. She set herself a rule of a picture a day, and bought a Fernand Léger the very afternoon Hitler invaded Norway. Nine years later she settled into this unfinished palazzo on the Grand Canal, turning it into her home and gallery for three decades.