2 Best Sights in Pécs, Hungary

The pioneer of Op Art (who left Hungary as a child and spent the rest of his life in Paris), Victor Vasarely was born Gyozo Vásárhelyi in 1908 in this house, which has been turned into something wild, as much a fun house as a museum. The first hall is a corridor of 3D visual tricks devised by his disciples, at the end of which hangs a hypnotic canvas of shifting cubes by Jean-Pierre Yvaral. Upstairs, the illusions grow profound: a zebra gallops by while chess pieces and blood cells seem to come at you.

If you haven't had your fill of Zsolnay, make a beeline for this museum. Occupying the upper floor of the oldest surviving building in Pécs, which dates from 1324 and has been built and rebuilt over the years in Romanesque, Renaissance, and Baroque styles, this museum is a merry show-and-tell waltz through a revolution in pottery that started in 1851. That's when local merchant Miklós Zsolnay bought the site of an old kiln and set up a stoneware factory for his son Ignác to run. Ignác’s brother, Vilmos, a shopkeeper with an artistic bent, bought the factory from him in 1863, imported experts from Germany, and (with the help of a Pécs pharmacist for chemical glaze experiments and his daughters for hand-painting) created the distinctive namesake porcelain. Today, the museum's collection includes Vilmos’s early efforts at Delft-blue handmade vases, cups, and saucers; his two-layer ceramics; examples of the gold-brocade rims that became a Zsolnay trademark; and table settings for royal families. Look up on your tour to see the unusual Zsolnay chandeliers lighting the way.