Plantin-Moretusmuseum
Plantin-Moretusmuseum stands on Antwerp’s Vrijdagmarkt, inside the former home and printing workshop of Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. Thirty preserved rooms show printing offices, a workshop, a library, living quarters, gold leather wall hangings, and a richly decorated courtyard.
Christophe Plantin founded the press in 1555, and the business later expanded under his son-in-law Jan Moretus. At its height, more than seventy people worked there, producing complex books including the eight-volume Plantin Polyglot Bible. You can see complete sets of type dies and matrices, rare books, paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, and archives connected to generations of printers and publishers.
Two of the world’s oldest surviving printing presses remain inside, alongside the five-language Biblia Polyglotta and Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The archives entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme in 2001, while the museum became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005.
- City
- Antwerp
- Content updated
Take this page with you
The myTuur app is free, and once you are standing at a spot its story starts by itself.
Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Antwerp. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.
What is myTuur?
myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.