City of London

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784).


I would like to talk about Culture and the price you have to pay for it.
As many of you know Europe is the craddle of the greatest collections of art. These are not only in museums, but in churches, monasteries, castle, palaces...etc.

Museé du Louvre, Museé d'Orsay, Centre Georges Pompidou (France); Rijksmuseum, Maurithuis, Van Gogh Museum (The Netherlands); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Belvedere Museum, Mumok (Austria); Pergamon Museum, Altes Museum, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Stuttgart, (Germany); Museo del Prado, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museo Nacional de Arte de Cataluña, Museo Reina Sofía (Spain); Museo Bargello, Galleria degli Uffizi, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Musei Vaticani, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (Italy), and many, many others....

Almost all those museums have a fee, expensive more of them. They maybe open with free access once a month or maybe they are free from an specific hour.
I think most of you visit museums, churches and that long etc. when you are travelling, and if you pay for its maybe you'll agree with me that could be an amount to consider. In case that you're a low budget traveler as I am, you'll have to give up some comfort if you want to visit all those "cathedrals of culture".
But there is a city where the most amazing collections are for free: London. Despite of being an expensive city for living (and for visiting), London is a place for culture because of the quality of its collections and the price you pay for its.
Museums like the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Tate Britain and Tate Modern, the Museum of London, all of them have a free access! You won't have to pay a penny for the Permanent Collection they have, and most of them have several masterpieces.
You can see from tapestries from Turkey to reliefs from Persia, african masks and T-rex dinosaur skeletons, paintings by Rothko and chinese costumes, greek statues and old airplanes, Rubens' paintings and japanese pottery. You can travel all around the world and jump back in time all that in the same city. No matter how deep is your pocket, if you belong to the upper class or if you live under a bridge, you all have free access to culture and knowledge, and that's wonderful. We all should have the chance to learn, to see, to get information for free. It is incredible to go the National Gallery and admire the paintings by Rubens or Botticelli and if you are tired you know you can go back again, as much as you like because it's free (I love this word).