Larco Museum

This guide to the Larco Museum in Lima follows Rafael Larco Hoyle, a young agronomist who inherited a few hundred ceramic vessels from his father in 1925 and never went back to running the family sugar plantation. It traces his years spent digging Peru's northern coast, buying out rival collectors, and building the first working chronology of the country's ancient cultures by 1946. Start in the storage gallery, where shelf after shelf still holds the collection he once counted by hand.