Europäisches Flakonglasmuseum

Perfume museums tell you about the liquid. This one is about the glass. The Europäisches Flakonglasmuseum holds a specialist collection of around 15,000 objects tracing the perfume flacon from antiquity to the present - the part of the object you actually hold, and the part almost every other museum treats as packaging.

Its location is the point. Kleintettau sits in Upper Franconia's historic glass-producing region, and the museum is on Glashüttenplatz, beside the Heinz-Glas works that still make bottles there. This is not a collection assembled in a city and shipped in; it is in the valley that produced the things. That gives it a claim no metropolitan museum can match.

It is run by Glasbewahrer am Rennsteig e.V., a volunteer association founded in 2007 with close to 300 members, which opened the museum in December 2008. Admission is 6 euros for adults and 4 for students, and the hours are unusually generous for a small museum: weekdays 8:00-17:00 with last entry at 16:00, Saturdays 10:00-16:00. There is a glass café next door.

A note on a figure you may see repeated: some listings describe the collection as spanning 350 years. The museum's own description says antiquity to modern, which is a far longer span, and does not use that number. We go with theirs.