Explore Bern

The Einstein House is the flat at Kramgasse 49 where Albert Einstein lived with Mileva Marić and their son Hans from 1903 to 1905, the period in which he wrote the 1905 papers on relativity and light quanta. The second-floor rooms are furnished as in his time, and an exhibition on the floor above covers his life and work.

The Kunstmuseum Bern opened in 1879 in a neo-Renaissance building by Eugen Stettler on Hodlerstrasse, at the edge of the old town. Its collection spans eight centuries, from Italian Trecento panels to Swiss painters such as Ferdinand Hodler and Albert Anker and modern works by Picasso and Paul Klee, and since 2014 it has held the Gurlitt bequest.

The Bern Historical Museum on Helvetiaplatz occupies a castle-style building by André Lambert from 1894, first designed as a candidate for the Swiss National Museum. Its collections run from Stone Age, Celtic and Roman finds to Burgundian tapestries and the Henri Moser oriental collection, and it houses the Einstein Museum.

The Zentrum Paul Klee is a museum on the eastern edge of Bern devoted to the painter Paul Klee, opened in 2005 in a building by Renzo Piano shaped as three steel-and-glass waves in the landscape. It holds about 40 percent of Klee's pictorial work, shown in changing selections and exhibitions, and includes the Creaviva studio for art workshops.