As anyone can attest who has been hopelessly lost in the Louvre’s endless wing of Renaissance furniture or attempted a complete Smithsonian circuit, museum-going can be a grueling and unrewarding experience, making both art snobs and neophytes feel like Sisyphus with a colorfully decorated boulder. Camus suggests that a person in this predicament need only change their mindset. I suggest that they simply go to one of these five museums.

5) The Uffizi Gallery in Florence was nearly excluded due to its terrible management. But after two hours packed in a line with obnoxious European school kids and creepy, silver-painted mimes, the gallery reveals treasures like no other can offer. The Uffizi boasts perhaps the largest single collection of Botticelli, and Filippo Lippi’s “Madonna and Child,” the best of this subject to be found in Florence. The gallery’s greatest virtue, however, is the room of Caravaggio at the end of the gallery, featuring two of the most dynamic and violent works of the man who invented violence and passion, and the only Italian painter to kill a man during a tennis match.

4) The Centre Pompidou is often derided as the ugliest building in Paris, a reputation it completely deserves, with its ostentatiously industrial McDonald’s playground fa