European museums on show - my personal bests 2

Stuck in Istanbul airport, I have a few battery hours before leaving this extremely hospitable country. The drive to Istanbul from Bursa this morning was through luscious countryside, mad traffic, a farmer on a tractor pulling a cart containing empty wooden boxes and a wife, olive groves, industrial areas, acres of garden centres displaying potted plants and full grown trees,a patchwork of small road side shops, people walking along the motorway to random bus stops under bridges, over the Bosphorus Bridge, on a feribot across the Marmara Denizi. It was made enjoyable by my two travelling companions - Regina from Zurich and Wolfgang from Dortmund.

Back to museums. My choice for best in design was Ljubljana's City Museum in Slovenia. I must confess to some partiality here, having worked on the interpretation for this museum with Event Communications, a museum design company based in London. Not much photographic material on the web, but you can check out the website for the exhibition, entitled Faces of Ljubljana http://www.obraziljubljane.si/en/. The exciting thing about this museum, however, is not so much the treasures it displays but its innovative display philosophy. Each era in the city's history is seen through the lens of a human typology - the most touching one (and one of the most poetic of the installations designed by Frenchman Arnaud Dechelle working at Event) is that of the Child, used to tell the story of WWII. A contemplative white space wrapped in barbed wire - Ljubljana was the only city to be completely surrounded by barbed wire during the war, effectively turning it into a ghetto and disrupting its lifeline to the countryside. Children became temporary orphans, separated from a parent working in the Resistance in the countryside, adopted by foster families, unsure of their future and their identity, called to be brave and stoic in the face of German and Italian occupation .

My best in commitment award goes to the Sa Bassa Blanca Museum in Mallorca, Spain, founded, funded and managed by the artists Ben Jakober and Yannick Vu, both of whom are delightful people. Their 30 acre property - including a sculpture park, an exhibition of 16th-19th century portraits of children, contemporary works from Vu Cao Dam, Rebecca Horn and Domenico Gnoli, as well as an underground exhibition area - is open to the public exclusively through their own efforts. To think of their dedication and passion and to set that against the total lack of public support is a sobering lesson in what is achievable. www.fundacionjakober.org

My last mention before I comment on the judges's selection goes to a museum that many would disagree is a museum at all - in the traditional sense. The Museum of Life Stories in Speicher in the Swiss Canton Appenzell is housed in the town's senior citizen's care home. It boasts a Gault Millau restaurant and a Remem-Bar, making me think of my own grandfather's life philosophy - once a gourmet, always a gourmet. The subjects of the displays, their authors, donors of the collections and storytellers are residents of the care home. Their first person accounts do what documentaries, museums and history books so often fail to do - give a taste of real life in the past. Leaving aside the right to privacy that we should continue to exercise in our faltering years, I thought this a touching tribute to lives lived and an emotional opportunity for each visitor to virtually 'adopt' a grandfather or grandmother.