When you think of Louisville, Kentucky, you probably think horses and baseball bats, but the city has a great deal to offer the traveler at any time of year – not just during the Kentucky Derby. You might be surprised to learn that it’s a large metropolitan city with a long tradition of supporting the arts. It has its own award-winning orchestra, opera, and ballet companies, as well as one of the country’s top regional theatres.

In the late 1970’s, the Louisville Ballet Company was the first regional company to lure Mikhail Baryshnikov to its stage. Actors Theatre of Louisville has been well-known in the theatre community for more than 25 years due to its new play festival held every spring. Some of the plays that have premiered at the festival have won Pulitzer prizes and become award-winning Broadway shows and films, such as On Golden Pond and Crimes of the Heart. Even as a New Yorker who has seen countless Broadway plays, some of the best theatre I’ve ever seen has been at Actors Theatre in Louisville.

In recent years, Louisville’s visual art community has grown by leaps and bounds. Art collectors are beginning to travel there because they can buy works by some of their favorite artists for less than they would pay in New York or Chicago. The reason is that Louisville gallery owners have lower overhead costs. The first Friday of every month is now called “The First Friday Trolley Hop,” where people can park their cars and ride free trolleys from one gallery to another. The event is often attended by as many as 15,000 art lovers. I found the work to be a mixture of great and not so great, but it was a really fun evening.

The Glassworks is a workshop for glass artists who create commissioned works in the studio space, where you can watch them demonstrate glass blowing and flameworking techniques. I’m fond of glass art, so I love this place. The Glassworks Galleries show work by local artists, while the Tobin Hewitt Gallery shows work by 40 of the world’s most renowned studio glass artists, with six rotating exhibitions every year. Some of the pieces are very large, but there’s definitely an opportunity to buy something to take home.

My favorite addition to Louisville’s cultural offerings is the Muhammad Ali Center, which had a star-studded opening in November 2005 attended by Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey, and Bill Clinton. Ali was a native of Louisville, and his center is one of the most inspiring places I have ever visited. I’ve been to the center three times and will gladly go back. It’s devoted to tolerance among religions and races. There are several floors with all sorts of innovative exhibits, one of which is a circular screen showing video on the ceiling. You sit in lounge chairs to watch. One of my favorite exhibits is one that you watch from the floor above, as you look down on a huge video screen that’s contained within a boxing ring. The video shows footage of Ali’s classic fights.

The Center isn’t entirely devoted to Ali. There are fun and educational interactive exhibits for kids within the Center that promote admirable qualities, such as dependability, courage, and acceptance, and school groups regularly visit. There are videos about the civil rights movement and an exhibit where you walk in to a diner and are told “you can’t come in.” It really sends home what it was like for African Americans in the 1960s.

Other videos discuss Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, and a wide screen shows video of Ali lighting the Olympic torch in a room filled with different colored Olympic torch light replicas that emerge from the floor. It chokes me up every time I visit that room, watching his hands shake from Parkinson’s Disease as he lights the torch. Ali’s Olympic medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom are on display at the Center, as well as most all of his other awards. I always leave there feeling moved and uplifted, and I think it’s reason enough to visit Louisville.

If you’re a baseball lover, you won’t want to miss the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, although I’ve never managed to get there myself. The Louisville Zoo is also excellent, especially if you’re traveling with kids. Other museums in town are the Speed Art Museum with more than 12,000 pieces, including a Native American gallery and my favorite – a 17th century English room that made me feel like I had stepped into Shakespeare’s time. From the Speed, join a walking tour of Old Louisville for an open-air Victorian architecture museum. The old homes on these streets are some of the best I’ve seen north of Savannah.

You could easily spend your entire stay in Louisville in the downtown area, which is where the most interesting sites are located, but if you’re willing to make a short half-hour drive to Shelbyville, Kentucky, you can sample the fried chicken that Colonel Sanders really intended at his wife’s famous restaurant, Claudia Sanders Dinner House. If there’s such a thing as southern gourmet cooking, this is it. I loved the tray of eight vegetables, but on the other end of the spectrum is Kentucky pie (sometimes called Kentucky Derby Pie), which is pecan pie with chocolate chips and a little bit of bourbon. It’s decadent but worth every calorie.

If you want to visit Louisville during the Kentucky Derby, you probably need to plan a year or two in advance. It never hurts to check with hotels for availability at the last minute, but if you decide to travel there at other times of the year, you can still visit the beautiful Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby Museum. Even if you see a race other than the Derby, you can get a sense of the history of horse racing in this modern city that combines flavors of the Midwest with the old south. Then, don’t forget to do one of my favorite things – take a ride on the historic paddlewheeler, The Belle of Louisville, while sipping a mint julep and reading Tom Sawyer.

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