Plantin-Moretus Museum

The Plantin-Moretus Museum at Vrijdagmarkt 22 in Antwerp, in the Flemish Region of Belgium, occupies the Renaissance and Baroque house and workshop of the printer Christophe Plantin and his descendants, the Moretus family. It is listed by UNESCO as the only museum in the world that preserves a printing house from the Renaissance period, with its original equipment intact. Visitors walk through a sequence of rooms that combine domestic life and industry: a courtyard with a vine, panelled rooms hung with tapestries and portraits, a library of historic volumes, and the print shop itself. The two oldest surviving printing presses in the world are displayed here, alongside type punches, matrices and engraved copper plates. The collection includes rare books, among them a Gutenberg Bible, and manuscripts, plus drawings associated with Rubens, who designed title pages for the house. A visit takes about 90 minutes. Labels and an audio guide explain how books were composed, printed and bound, and the museum also covers the Antwerp book trade that made the city a leading publishing centre in the sixteenth century. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday and closed on Mondays. Adult tickets cost roughly EUR 12, and visitors under 19 enter free, but current prices are published on museumplantinmoretus.be. Weekday mornings tend to be quiet, while Saturday and school holidays are busier. The building is a short walk from the Grote Markt, about eight minutes, or can be reached by tram 24 to Vrijdagmarkt. Photography without flash is typically allowed, but visitors should check the rules in individual rooms.