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West of Slovenska, Cankarjeva heads down towards a neatly ordered corner of town that contains the city's most important museums . The National Museum (Narodni muzej; Tues-Sun 10am-6pm, Thurs until 8pm; 500SIT; www.narmuz-lj.si ) at Muzejska 1 contains numerous dim halls of archeological objects, most famous of which is the Vacka Situla , a locally found Iron Age cauldron decorated with scenes of ritual feasting. The museum's natural history section is notable only for having the one complete mammoth skeleton found in Europe. The National Gallery (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; 500SIT, free Sat pm; www.ng-slo.si ) at Cankarjeva 20 is housed in the former Narodni Dom, built in the 1890s to accommodate Slovene cultural institutions in defiance of the Habsburgs. The gallery is rich in local medieval Gothic work, although most visitors gravitate towards the halls devoted to the Slovene Impressionists Rihard Jakopic, Ivan Grohar, Matija Jama and Matej Sternen. Their movement had considerable importance for the development of the Slovene national consciousness, extolling the virtues of rural Slovene peasantry and elevating them to the status of a subject fit for art. There's more Gothic stuff, as well as high-profile temporary exhibitions, in a new extension to the gallery (same times & prices) one block to the north at Puharjeva 9. Back on the Cankarjeva, the Museum of Modern Art at no. 15 (Moderna galerija; Tues-Sat 10am-6/7pm, Sun 10am-1pm; 500SIT) carries on where the National Gallery left off, showing how the Slovene Impressionists developed more experimental styles in the early years of the twentieth century. The rest of the collection is pretty uninspiring save for interwar works by the Kralj brothers and paintings from the 1980s by Irwin - a group of artists whose mixing of Slovene folkloric imagery with totalitarian symbols earned them considerable notoriety. Beyond the art galleries, Cankarjeva leads you past an unobtrusive twentieth-century Serbian Orthodox church to Tivoli Park , an expanse of lawns and tree-lined walkways backed by dense woodland. Most of Ljubljana's recreational and sporting facilities can be found in the sports centre at the northern end of the park. A villa above the centre contains the most enjoyable of Ljubljana's museums, the Museum of Modern History (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; 400SIT, free first Sun of the month) with dioramas, imaginative lighting, video screens and period music combining to produce an evocative journey through twentieth-century Slovene history. To the south and west of the park, a succession of pathways winds up into the Roznik Hills - a beautiful, tranquil region of woodland no more than ten minutes from the city centre. There are a number of tracks leading to the not-too-distant summit of Cankarjev Vrh, where you'll find the Roznik Inn , site of a memorial room dedicated to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century novelist Ivan Cankar (summer only 10am-2pm) who died here after one of his customary bouts of heavy drinking. The area comes to life on the night of April 30/May 1, when bonfires are lit near the summit and thousands of locals assemble for a mass outdoor party.
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