Secret Museums

The secret room where early Bolsheviks cranked out propaganda fliers on a smuggled printing press.

A narrow passage next to a cafe leads to a courtyard exploding with murals, tags, and paste-ups.

The doodles of a genius line the walls of a secret room under the Medici Chapel, where they were hidden for nearly 500 years.

"There's nothing there," and other lies the KGB told us.

A French-Colonial era collection of taxidermy and wet specimens, secreted away in the National University of Hanoi.

A New York garbage depot holds a secret collection of weird and wonderful refuse.

Since 1874, this macabre collection has developed into a museum devoted to Scotland Yard's mementos of dastardly deeds.

Long-secret natural history museum, featuring the skull of a "Terror Bird."

A secretive collection featuring objects that were designed specifically for U.S. intelligence operations.

Eighteen miniature death-scene dioramas.

The once forbidden "secret cabinet" of erotic art from excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The largest medical and anatomical collection in France lies hidden from the public.