The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ask anyone visiting New York for the first time what museum they want to see, and the answer is almost always the same: the Met. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street on the Upper East Side, is the largest art museum in the Americas and one of the most visited museums on earth. Its collection spans 5,000 years of human creativity, from prehistoric artifacts to contemporary works, across 17 curatorial departments.

The Met was chartered in 1870 by a group of New York businessmen, artists, and philanthropists who believed a young American city deserved a museum to rival those of Europe. It first opened to the public in 1872 in a rented building at 681 Fifth Avenue, with a modest collection of about 175 European paintings and a Roman sarcophagus. Within a few years it had outgrown that home and moved, briefly, to a mansion on West 14th Street before settling permanently on its present site at the eastern edge of Central Park. The first purpose-built wing on the site, a red-brick Gothic building designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, opened in 1880. That original building still stands, but it is now buried deep inside the museum, wrapped by more than a century of additions.

The building you see from Fifth Avenue today is mostly the work of later generations. The grand Beaux-Arts facade, the vaulted Great Hall, and the Grand Stairway were designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Hunt died in 1895, and his son Richard Howland Hunt completed the facade in 1902. The firm of McKim, Mead & White extended the limestone wings north and south along Fifth Avenue in the 1910s. Look closely at the top of the facade and you will spot a famous unfinished detail: four piles of rough, uncarved limestone above the columns, left as blocks when the money ran out and the planned sculptural groups were never carved.

Every visit to the Met begins the same way, and that is by design. Climbing the broad front steps from Fifth Avenue, you pass through one of three great arches into the Great Hall, a vast limestone space of domes, arches, and columns that Hunt intended as a ceremonial threshold. It slows you down, makes you look up, and announces that what follows is on a different scale from ordinary life.

From the Great Hall, the Grand Stairway rises to the second floor, where the European paintings galleries begin. But the wise first-time visitor resists the urge to simply climb and wander. The Met is so large — about two million square feet — that no one sees it all in a day, and the museum's layout rewards a plan: pick two or three wings, give each an unhurried hour, and save the rest for a return visit. The ground floor holds the Greek and Roman galleries to the south and the Egyptian galleries to the north; the second floor holds European paintings, American art, and much more.

The single most unforgettable room in the Met is the Sackler Wing, home of the Temple of Dendur. The temple is a small sandstone structure built around 15 BCE in Nubia, in what is now southern Egypt, under the Roman emperor Augustus, and dedicated to the goddess Isis and two deified Nubian brothers, Pedesi and Pihor. In the 1960s, the construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened to flood it, and as part of UNESCO's international campaign to save the monuments of Nubia, Egypt gave the temple to the United States. It was awarded to the Met, dismantled stone by stone, shipped to New York, and reconstructed here; it has been on view since 1978.

The gallery around it is part of the experience. A sloping glass wall faces Central Park, and a reflecting pool in front of the temple stands in for the Nile, so the sandstone glows in changing natural light through the day. It is worth arriving early or late, when the light is low and the crowds thin, and simply sitting on the benches to take it in. You walk around the temple, close enough to see the carved reliefs of Augustus making offerings to the gods.

Around the temple, the Egyptian department holds tens of thousands of objects, from monumental statuary to jewelry, papyri, and the small painted things buried with the dead. To the south, the Greek and Roman galleries run the length of the museum in a long, sunlit wing, from Cycladic figurines of the third millennium BCE through Attic vases, Roman portrait busts, and wall paintings recovered from villas near Pompeii.

Upstairs, the European paintings galleries hold some of the best-known pictures in North America. The Met owns five paintings by Johannes Vermeer, more than any other museum in the world, out of a surviving body of Vermeers that numbers only in the mid-thirties. Nearby hang works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Velazquez, and the French Impressionists, along with Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses and his Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat. Pick the names you love and seek them out; the rest will reward you on the way.

The American Wing, at the museum's north end, is the other great pilgrimage. Its centerpiece is Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, the enormous 1851 canvas — more than 21 feet wide — showing George Washington and the Continental Army crossing the ice-choked Delaware on the night of December 25 to 26, 1776, before the surprise attack at Trenton. Around it, the wing gathers Gilbert Stuart's portraits of Washington, period rooms transplanted whole from early American houses, and the light-filled Charles Engelhard Court, where monumental sculpture and stained glass stand under a glass roof.

The museum also has a second site, The Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, devoted to medieval European art and architecture — a different kind of visit entirely, and worth a trip of its own.

The Met rewards a strategy. Arrive when the doors open if you can, and head first to the Temple of Dendur or the European paintings before the midday crowds build. Wear comfortable shoes: the floors are stone and the distances are long. Use the Great Hall as your compass — it is the one space every route returns to.

Give yourself a break halfway through. The museum's cafes and the rooftop garden, open in the warmer months, offer a view back across Central Park's canopy, and a pause makes the second half of a visit far more enjoyable than a forced march. If you are visiting with children, the Egyptian galleries and the arms and armor are reliable favorites. And if you leave feeling you have only scratched the surface, that is the correct feeling: the Met has been growing for more than 150 years, and its collection is designed to reward return visits for a lifetime.