Hungarian State Opera House

Emperor Franz Joseph I agreed to co-finance an opera house for Budapest on one condition: it must not be larger than the Vienna State Opera. Architect Miklós Ybl obeyed the letter of the law and built something slightly smaller — then made it so extraordinarily beautiful that, according to legend, Franz Joseph attended the opening night in 1884 and said: "I told you it shouldn't be bigger than our Opera in Vienna, but I apparently forgot to tell you it should not be nicer either."

The neo-Renaissance exterior on Andrássy Avenue is handsome enough, but the interior is the real spectacle. The auditorium seats 1,261 people under a ceiling painted by Károly Lotz, and it has the third-best acoustics in Europe after La Scala in Milan and the Palais Garnier in Paris. A three-ton bronze chandelier illuminates frescoes depicting the gods of Olympus, and every surface is covered in gilding, marble, and carved ornament. The building took nine years to construct, from 1875 to 1884, and every detail was handcrafted.

The opera house sits on Andrássy Avenue, itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site and often called the Champs-Élysées of Budapest. Beneath the avenue runs continental Europe's oldest metro line, the M1, which opened in 1896 and was partly built to serve the opera house. The metro stations still have their original tile work and cast-iron railings.

You can attend a performance for remarkably little money by European standards, or take a daytime guided tour that includes the royal box and backstage areas. Either way, the Opera House is one of Budapest's finest interiors — a building designed to prove that a smaller empire could have bigger taste.