Getty Villa

The faux-Roman residence J. Paul Getty built in 1974 for his art collection has re-opened after a nine-year closure for renovations. The Villa is the only museum of Greek and Roman antiquities in America — related to the Getty Center the way the Cloisters in upper Manhattan, devoted to the art of medieval Europe, is to its parent, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The renovated museum has 48,000 square feet of gallery space displaying 1,200 artifacts — not to mention four gardens with more than 300 flowering plants.