Moments from Palacio de Bellas Artes

Construction on Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts began in 1904 under the direction of dictator Porfirio Diaz, who commissioned an Italian architect, Adamo Boari, to build a marble Art Nouveau palace grand enough to rival Europe's opera houses. The 1910 Revolution interrupted construction for decades, and by the time the building finally opened in 1934, tastes had shifted so far that the interior was completed in Art Deco style by a different architect, Federico Mariscal, leaving the building with an unusual split personality: an ornate European Art Nouveau exterior wrapped around a strikingly geometric Art Deco interior.

The heavy Carrara marble shell has also been slowly sinking into Mexico City's notoriously soft, drained lakebed soil for over a century, the same subsidence problem that affects much of the historic center, so the building now sits noticeably lower than the street around it. Inside, don't miss Diego Rivera's Man, Controller of the Universe, a mural he repainted here after his original version, commissioned for Rockefeller Center in New York, was destroyed for including a portrait of Lenin that the Rockefellers refused to remove. Murals by Orozco and Siqueiros surround it, making the palace's upper floors essentially a concentrated survey of Mexican muralism's three most important names in one building.