Dublin

The Book of Kells gets the billing, but the Long Room is the reason to go. Two storeys of oak shelving, 65 metres end to end, 200,000 of the library's oldest books, and a barrel-vaulted ceiling added in the 1850s when they ran out of shelf space — this is what a library looks like when a civilisation is taking itself seriously. The marble busts of great scholars line the lower level: Swift, Aristotle, Newton, Socrates. Book tickets online the night before; go at opening time before the tour groups thicken. Stand at one end, look down the full length of it, and say nothing for a moment. That feeling is Dublin distilled. The Long Room is perfect shelter on a wet day, best visited at opening time.

Free entry, a Caravaggio, a Vermeer, and the finest collection of Irish art in the world — Jack B. Yeats alone is worth the walk up from Merrion Square. Most visitors spend half a day in the British Museum or the Louvre and walk past this in twenty minutes. Don't. The Irish rooms on the upper floor, where Yeats' colour-saturated paintings of the west of Ireland hang in sequence, constitute one of the most emotionally loaded collections in Europe. Quiet on weekday mornings. The café is also genuinely good. Stay dry indoors with one of Dublin's finest collections on this thoroughly wet evening.

The finest museum experience in Dublin that most visitors never find. A single Georgian townhouse on the north side tells the entire arc of Dublin's social history — from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who built it in the 1740s, to the period when fifteen families shared it as a tenement, one room each. Guided tours only, small groups, booked in advance. The room where four children slept in a single bed while their parents worked will stay with you longer than anything in the more famous museums to the south. A guided tour through 14 Henrietta Street offers warmth and shelter on wet afternoons.