Palacio de Bellas Artes

The Palacio de Bellas Artes is Mexico City's great architectural double exposure: an Italian art-nouveau wedding cake of white Carrara marble outside (begun 1904, under Porfirio Díaz's Europhile regime) and, inside, a 1930s art-deco temple of Mexican red marble and stylised Maya masks — because the Revolution happened in between, construction stopped for two decades, and the building finished as the monument of a different country. It is so heavy it has sunk four metres into the old lakebed since construction, which the city treats with affectionate resignation; the sinking is part of the biography.

Two experiences share the building. By day, the museum: the middle floors hold the murals, and they are the point — Rivera's Man, Controller of the Universe, his defiant 1934 recreation of the mural Rockefeller Center destroyed for including Lenin (Rivera repainted it here, Lenin intact, adding Rockefeller himself near the syphilis bacteria — history's most elegant revenge), flanked by Orozco's furious Katharsis and works by Siqueiros and Tamayo. The architecture tour of the theatre itself reveals the two treasures the lobby hides: the stained-glass stage curtain — a million Tiffany crystal pieces forming the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, unique on earth — and the Marotti glass ceiling with Apollo in amber. By night, the Ballet Folklórico de México: Amalia Hernández's company has run its kaleidoscope of regional dance here for seven decades, and it remains the single best-value spectacle in the capital — deer dances, Jalisco skirts like spinning suns, the Tiffany curtain glowing before the lights drop.

Craft: the museum closes Mondays; the murals want 60–90 minutes; and the Ballet Folklórico plays Wednesday and Sunday schedules — book the show, not just the building, because the theatre working is the building complete. The Alameda park setting stacks the visit perfectly with the Diego Rivera Mural Museum (his Alameda dream painting, two blocks west), the Correo Mayor's gilded post-office staircase across the street, and the Torre Latinoamericana observation deck next door for the aerial epilogue. The café on the museum floor overlooks the Tiffany dome; the Sears café opposite overlooks the palace itself — the two best-kept non-secrets on the Alameda.