Antwerp suits travelers who want art in the place it was made. Start at the Cathedral of Our Lady, where four Rubens paintings hang, two of them painted for the building itself. The Rubenshuis adds his baroque garden, the library, and the Rubens Experience, while the artist's residence stays closed for restoration.

KMSKA in Het Zuid carries seven centuries of Flemish painting, from the Primitives through James Ensor and Rik Wouters. Museum Plantin-Moretus, the only museum on the UNESCO World Heritage List, keeps the two oldest printing presses in the world.

Antwerp works well with children, largely because so little of it needs a car. ZOO Antwerpen sits directly beside Antwerpen-Centraal, which makes it an easy start or end to a day in the center.

The MAS runs escalators up to a free rooftop panorama over the city and the port. The Red Star Line Museum turns the crossing to America into a story older children can follow, and the Middelheim sculpture park lets everyone loose in an open park. Pace a museum morning with an outdoor afternoon and the day holds together.

The Scheldt is the reason Antwerp exists, and the waterfront is still where the city feels most itself. The walk along the water leads north from the old quays toward the Eilandje docks, where the Red Star Line Museum keeps the line's original departure warehouses.

The MAS stands at the center of that district, with the largest museum collection of harbor cranes in the world on the quay outside, free to see. South of the center, the Middelheim sculpture park spreads around 400 sculptures across an open park, with work by Giacometti, Rik Wouters, and Panamarenko among the trees.