The standard first day is the national museum. Get the overview, understand the history, then go and look at the place with context.
I did this for years and retained almost none of it, and I have come to think the order is backwards.
Why it does not work
A national museum presents several thousand years of history to somebody who arrived the previous evening, is tired, and has no framework to attach any of it to.
The names mean nothing. The periods mean nothing. The objects are impressive and undifferentiated.
Three hours later you have looked at a great deal and retained a general impression of antiquity. I could not, after several such visits, have told you anything specific a week afterwards.
The problem is not the museum. It is that information without a question attached to it does not stick.
What generates the question
Walking around first. Two or three days of just being in the place, looking at buildings, noticing things.
What that produces is specific curiosity. Why is there a wall here. Why does this quarter look completely different from that one. Why is this church in a style I do not recognise. Who is the man on all the statues.
Then the museum is answering questions rather than delivering material, and the difference in retention is enormous.
It also makes the museum shorter and better. You go looking for particular things rather than walking through every room dutifully.
The specialist museum over the general one
A related change. The national museum covers everything and consequently covers nothing in depth.
Smaller museums about one thing — a craft, an industry, a period, a person, a building — are almost always better experiences.
They are shorter, which matters more than people admit. Museum fatigue is real and sets in after about ninety minutes, and everything after that is wasted.
They are usually less crowded. And the person at the desk frequently knows a great deal and has nobody to tell, which has produced some of the best conversations I have had while travelling.
The things that are not museums
Where I now spend more of the cultural part of a trip.
Markets, which tell you what people eat, what is made locally, and what things cost.
Cemeteries, which sound morbid and are extraordinary. Names, dates, languages, what people died of and when, the relative wealth of families, and periods where a lot of young men died at once.
Ordinary religious buildings rather than the cathedral. The neighbourhood church or mosque or temple that people actually use is a different thing from the monument.
Public transport at rush hour, which is the most efficient way to see how a city works and who lives in it.
And a supermarket, which sounds absurd and is genuinely informative about a place's economy, agriculture and daily life.
Reading before rather than during
The other order change that helped.
Reading history while there competes with being there. Reading one decent book about the place beforehand means arriving with a framework already, which is what the museum was supposed to provide and does badly.
Fiction from the place works at least as well as history for this. A novel set somewhere gives you the texture, the concerns and the arguments in a way that a chronology does not.
What I avoid now is guidebook history, which is compressed to the point of being a list of names and dates with no connective tissue.
When the museum is the point
To be clear, some are, and the argument does not apply to them.
A collection that is genuinely world-class, or that holds specific things you came to see, is a destination in its own right and deserves a day.
And in places where much of the physical heritage was destroyed, the museum may hold the only remaining evidence of what was there, in which case it is not an introduction, it is the thing itself.
The order I use now
Arrive, walk, get lost deliberately, eat, look at things without reading about them.
Write down the questions that come up, because they evaporate otherwise.
Then go to whatever answers them, which is sometimes the national museum and is more often something smaller.
And leave the big museum until near the end, when it functions as consolidation rather than as introduction. It is a much better visit at that point, and it is considerably shorter.
The practical bit about visiting
A few things that improve any museum visit, whenever you go.
Ninety minutes, then leave, regardless of how much is left. Coming back the next day is better than continuing past the point of absorbing anything, and most tickets allow re-entry.
Pick three or four things in advance and see those properly rather than walking every room.
Go early or late. The middle of the day is the worst of it everywhere.
And free entry periods, which most public institutions have, are the most crowded times, so paying is occasionally the better choice.
What guides in museums are for
The audio guide is generally a recorded version of the wall text. A human guide, where available, is a different thing and is worth asking about at the desk, since many institutions run short talks that are not advertised anywhere obvious.