It's not the name of a single museum, but an abbreviation for a center of galleries featuring extravagant and extraordinary objects. The most fascinating is the Bourdalou Museum (Chamber Pot Museum), the first in the world, where, incredibly, more than 2,000 examples give visitors a fascinating glimpse of two millennia of chamber pot history. This gallery is guaranteed to elicit a smile, if not a giggle, from even the most jaded museumgoer. Down through the centuries, all cultures were familiar with some form of the chamber pot and would decorate these very functional items according to their taste. As the centuries went by, the ornamentation grew more baroque and decorative, as if to disguise their real function. Some of these chamber pots -- called \"faithful companions\" -- were owned by royalty and other imperial personages. Another branch of ZAM is the Pedal-Car Museum, tracing a century, in miniature, of the automobile. This amazing collection begins in the 19th century and goes on to include sophisticated creations of Bugatti, Mercedes, and Rolls-Royce, all copies for children. The Sisi Museum is the first of its kind to be devoted to the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the queen of Franz-Josef. Furniture, clothing, paintings, photographs, letters, and several hundred of the Empress's personal objects re-create her fascinating life, which was ended by an assassin in Switzerland. At the Easter Bunny Museum, more than a thousand bunnies illustrate what an important figure the rabbit was in the fantasy world of children. The Museum of Scent displays elaborate perfume flasks, some 5,000 objects, used to bottle scents. These range from the age of Biedermeier to more modern editions, including miniatures. Some of the exclusive limited editions from the houses of Dior, Chanel, Lalique, Baccarat, Mouson, and 4711 are exhibited.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Munich & the Bavarian Alps, 6th Edition, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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