DAStietz Leipzig & Western Saxony

Beautifully renovated, this former 1913 department store now houses the city library as well as the Neue Sächsische Galerie, which presents contemporary Saxon art, and the Museum für Naturkunde, whose most interesting exhibit, the Versteinerter Wald (petrified forest), can be admired for free in the atrium; some of the stony trunks are 290 million years old.