Casino Luxembourg

Despite the name, nobody has gambled here in a very long time. This was the Casino Bourgeois, opened in 1882: a "casino" in the old European sense, a private club for the city's bourgeoisie with a reading room, a restaurant and halls for balls, lectures and concerts — and, yes, card tables. The architects were Pierre and Paul Funck, the father and son who would later build the Cercle on Place d'Armes.

Its most famous evening came on the 19th of July 1886, when Franz Liszt, seventy-four years old and twelve days from his death, sat down at the piano here and gave the last recital of his life. During the First World War the building had a darker tenant: the German Kaiser made it his headquarters.

The state bought it in 1959 and rented it to the cultural circle of the young European institutions, adding the glass-and-steel pavilion on the south side that year. Then, for Luxembourg's turn as European Capital of Culture in 1995, the Swiss artist Urs Raussmüller filled the rooms with open-topped white cubes to make hanging space, and the experiment stuck. Since March 1996 this has been the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d'art contemporain.

There is no permanent collection. What you get instead is a rotating programme of contemporary exhibitions, often made for these rooms, and a free library of some seven thousand books on art since the 1960s. Closed on Tuesdays.