Explore Philadelphia

The Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul is the mother church of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, on Logan Square at the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Built of brownstone from 1846 to 1864 to designs by Napoleon LeBrun and John Notman, it has a copper dome and interiors painted by Constantino Brumidi; it also hosts the light-and-sound show LUMINISCENCE.

The Academy of Natural Sciences, founded in 1812 and part of Drexel University since 2011, is the oldest natural science research institution in the Americas. Its museum on Logan Square shows a dinosaur hall with a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, historic wildlife dioramas and a tropical butterfly house.

The Franklin Institute is a science museum named after Benjamin Franklin, founded in 1824 and housed since 1934 in a Neoclassical building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It has hands-on exhibits on physics, electricity, the human body and space, the Fels Planetarium, a Baldwin steam locomotive and the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.

The Mütter Museum is the medical history museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, founded in 1858 with the collection of the surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter. It shows anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, skeletons and antique medical instruments, including the Hyrtl skull collection and slides of Albert Einstein's brain.

The Barnes Foundation shows the collection assembled by the chemist Albert C. Barnes, with large groups of paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse alongside African sculpture, furniture and ironwork. Founded in 1922 in Merion, it moved in 2012 to a building by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where the rooms keep Barnes's own arrangements.

The National Constitution Center is a museum about the US Constitution on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, opened on July 4, 2003 in a building designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Its galleries explain the Constitution and its history through historic documents, artifacts and interactive exhibits, and it hosts public debates and lectures.

The Rodin Museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway opened in 1929 as the gift of the cinema owner Jules Mastbaum, in a Beaux-Arts building and garden by Paul Cret and Jacques Gréber. Run by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it shows bronzes, marbles and plasters by Auguste Rodin, with a cast of The Thinker at the gate and The Gates of Hell at the entrance.

The Benjamin Franklin Museum lies beneath Franklin Court, the site of Franklin's house off Market Street, now part of Independence National Historical Park. Robert Venturi's steel ghost structure of 1976 outlines the vanished house above the museum, and the court's row houses hold a working printing office and a post office.

The Museum of the American Revolution is a history museum at Third and Chestnut Streets, two blocks from Independence Hall, opened on 19 April 2017. Its brick building by Robert A.M. Stern Architects holds galleries on the Revolutionary War, and a theatre shows George Washington's original field tent.

The Betsy Ross House on Arch Street is a brick house of about 1740 where Betsy Ross, the upholsterer whom family tradition credits with sewing the first American flag, is said to have lived and worked. Restored in the 1930s, its small rooms are furnished in 18th-century style, and Ross and her third husband are buried in the courtyard.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was founded in 1876 and moved in 1928 into its neoclassical main building on Fairmount, at the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Its collection spans Asian, European and American art, from medieval cloisters to Duchamp, and the east entrance stairs became known as the Rocky Steps after the 1976 film.

The Penn Museum is the University of Pennsylvania's museum of archaeology and anthropology at 33rd and South Streets, in a brick building begun in 1899. It holds more than a million objects from its own excavations and collecting, with galleries on Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, Rome, Africa, Asia and the Americas, including a 13-ton granite sphinx of Ramesses II.

Battleship New Jersey is the Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey, commissioned in 1943, which served in the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and off Lebanon before her final decommissioning in 1991. Since 2001 she has been a museum ship on the Camden waterfront in New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, open to visitors on deck and below.