Museo Franz Mayer

This guide to Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City follows Franz Mayer, a German-born stockbroker who arrived in 1905, lost his wife Maria Antonieta soon after their 1913 marriage, and spent the next five decades chasing ceramics, silver and textiles at auction after auction until his collection topped ten thousand pieces. It traces the building itself back further still, to a hospital that monks of the Order of San Juan de Dios ran on this site for some four hundred years. Visitors today can buy a separate ticket just to sit with a coffee in the courtyard where the monks once worked.