Fitzwilliam Museum

Listen to Trumpington Street for a moment. There is the hiss of bicycle tyres, footsteps on stone, and the quiet trickle of water in the deep gutters that run beside the pavement. Then the street opens, and a wall of pale stone columns rises in front of you. Broad steps climb towards a deep, shadowed portico. Two stone lions sit at the foot of it, calm and heavy. This is the Fitzwilliam Museum, and it was built to impress anyone who walked past.

The museum began with one man and one will. Richard FitzWilliam, the seventh Viscount FitzWilliam, was an Irish nobleman and a former student of the University of Cambridge. When he died in 1816, he left his collection to the university. It held paintings, prints, illuminated manuscripts and a fine library of music. He also left money for a building worthy of it all. That gift is the reason you are standing here today.

For its first decades, the collection had no proper home. It was shown in borrowed rooms, including an old school building and part of the university library. The university knew it needed something grand. A design competition was held, and the young architect George Basevi won it. Building work started in the late 1830s. Basevi chose the language of ancient temples: a long front of tall Corinthian columns, which are the slender columns topped with carved acanthus leaves.

Here is a sad twist that most visitors never hear. Basevi did not live to see his museum finished. In 1845 he was inspecting the tower of Ely Cathedral, not far from Cambridge, and he fell to his death. The work passed to Charles Robert Cockerell, a leading architect of the day. Later, Edward Middleton Barry completed the great entrance hall. So the building you see is the work of several hands across several decades.

Now look again at the two lions on the steps. They have become one of the best-loved sights in Cambridge, and they carry a local legend. Students say that when the clock strikes midnight, the lions climb down from their places. They walk to the gutters of Trumpington Street and drink the water running there. No one has ever caught them doing it, of course. But it is a fine story to remember as you pass them after dark.

Those gutters are real, and they have their own history. The water belongs to Hobson's Conduit, a channel built in the early seventeenth century to bring fresh water into the town. Thomas Hobson was a Cambridge carrier who hired out horses. He is also remembered in the phrase "Hobson's choice", which means no real choice at all. He made customers take the horse nearest the door. Watch your step here — the deep channels catch a careless foot.

Walk inside, and the scale changes. The entrance hall is a burst of colour after the pale stone outside. Look for polished marble, painted ceilings, gilded detail and a sweeping staircase that rises through the space. The Victorians wanted visitors to feel that art was precious and important. Pause on the floor and look up before you go further. Many people hurry straight to the galleries and miss the hall itself, which is a work of art in its own right.

That staircase holds a story that made news around the world. In 2006, a visitor tripped on the stairs. He fell into three large Chinese porcelain vases from the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from the seventeenth century into the early twentieth. The vases broke into many pieces. Museum conservators spent months fitting the fragments back together. The repaired vases returned to display — a quiet lesson in patience, and in watching where you walk.

The collections reach far beyond the founder's gift. Over two centuries, donors and purchases have added objects from across the world and across thousands of years. There are antiquities from ancient Egypt, including painted coffins. There are Greek and Roman sculptures and vases. There is a very large collection of coins and medals, one of the most important in Britain. You can move from a carved Egyptian face to a Renaissance painting in just a few rooms.

The painting galleries hold work by many European masters. Among the treasures are paintings by Titian, the great Venetian painter of the sixteenth century, along with works by Rubens and Rembrandt. Later rooms carry you towards French Impressionism, the movement that painted light and passing moments in loose, visible brushstrokes. Take your time in front of a single picture. Step close to see the brushwork, then step back and let the whole image settle.

One treasure is easy to miss, because it is not a picture at all. Part of the founder's original gift was a manuscript now known as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. It is a large collection of keyboard music from England around the time of Queen Elizabeth the First. The virginal was a small keyboard instrument, a kind of harpsichord. Musicians still study and play this music today. The book is fragile and is not always on display, but its name follows the museum everywhere.

The Fitzwilliam is also a working part of the University of Cambridge. Researchers study its objects, and students sketch in its galleries. Its prints, drawings and manuscripts are kept in careful conditions, and only some can be shown at any one time. So the rooms change. Exhibitions come and go, and objects rotate in and out of storage. If you return in a year, you may well meet something you have never seen before.

When you leave, stop at the top of the steps. In front of you, Trumpington Street runs north towards the old heart of the city. Next door stands Peterhouse, the oldest of the Cambridge colleges. Cyclists pass. Water runs in Hobson's channels. Behind you, two centuries of collecting sit quietly in their rooms. And on your way down, give the lions a glance... just in case one of them has moved.