Already one of the world's greatest cities for museums, Paris has added three new masterpieces to pack into this summer's vacation plans.

The Musée du quai Branly — the largest museum to open in the city in decades — offers an exploration of ancient civilizations; the recently renovated Musée de l'Orangerie invites visitors on a visual stroll through Monet's tranquil water-lily ponds; and the improved Petit Palais allows a peek at the lavish lifestyles of Parisians in centuries past.

The settings of each are dramatic, and the exhibits are entrancing enough to wow the most seasoned museum aficionado. Each museum offers a journey through a different era. But the themes remain constant — glimpses of the pleasures and challenges of everyday life as interpreted by artisans, whether they were carving figurines from a tree in a South African jungle or capturing sunlight on canvas on a summer evening near Paris.

MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY

A decade in the making and the main cultural legacy of President Jacques Chirac, the Musée du quai Branly opened June 23. It contains one of the world's largest collections of ancient African art, along with large exhibitions of statues, textiles, masks and weapons from the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

The museum rambles along the bank of the Seine, its curved glass exterior mimicking the bend in the river. The Eiffel Tower rises just beyond it. The five-story facade of the administrative building is a vertical garden, lushly carpeted with 15,000 plants indigenous to Europe, the United States, China and Japan.

Inside the museum, collections of carved totems and early weapons, masks and statues are juxtaposed with modernistic architecture. The alternating use of darkness and subdued lighting creates the illusion of exploring mysterious caves and forests and stumbling upon the treasures of lost civilizations.

The museum has no corridors or hallways. It's easy to become lost among the free-flowing displays of brilliant feathered headdresses from the Amazon or brightly painted masks of cobwebs and clay from Pacific islands. And that's exactly what the designers intended: to give visitors a "sense of disorientation, breaking from the traditional codes governing museums," according to a description of the museum by its curators. "Visitors become explorers."

MUSÉE DE L'ORANGERIE

On the right bank of the Seine, in a corner of the sprawling Tuileries Gardens, the newly renovated Musée de l'Orangerie — with its massive murals of Monet's ethereal water-lily pond — is one of the most enchanting art museums in Paris.

The light-filled museum was built in 1852 as a greenhouse for the Tuileries Gardens. Step out of the summer heat and tourist mayhem, cross an interior bridge and enter a magical world of weeping willows and lily pads. Two cavernous oval rooms provide 360-degree panoramas of the views that became Monet's artistic obsession in the later years of his life — the play of light on his beloved water-lily ponds.

On one horizon, the water reflects the lavenders and pale blues of a misty sunrise. Turn to the opposite horizon, and the hues intensify into the molten gold of a fiery orb dissolving in a brilliant pool of yellow water. In between, lilies seem to float on clouds and dreamy azure skies reflected in the water.

The museum, which served as a bunkhouse for soldiers on home leave during World War I, reopened in May after six years of work. Construction crews gutted its second floor and opened Monet's murals to natural light from skylights filtered through protective white gauze. The visual effect transports visitors to the ponds and gardens that surround Monet's home and studio in the village of Giverny outside Paris.

Because the murals were too large to move, workers encased them in giant boxes during the painting, drilling and blasting. The newly created galleries beneath the water-lily rooms include a small collection of works by Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse and Soutine displayed in wide corridors and side rooms.

PETIT PALAIS

The ornate Petit Palais reopened six months ago after a five-year renovation to expand its galleries, restore its interior gardens and rejuvenate its massive main-floor open spaces. The museum is a celebration of Parisian life and "a journey through art history from antiquity to 1900," according to its curators.

A subterranean floor of galleries has been added, which allows visitors to see 1,300 of the 45,000 works in the museum collection. But it is the airy, grand spaces of the main floor that make the Petit Palais worth the visit. Artisans have carefully restored its colorful ceiling murals and intricate Italian floor mosaics.

The gallery is filled with paintings of drunken Bastille Day celebrations of centuries past, magnificent statuary and exquisite porcelain figures, including a clock maker's fantasy of an ornate clock surrounded by porcelain animals playing musical instruments.