• What to know if you go

Museum of Arts and Sciences (ENLARGE)

Former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and his wife had a home in Daytona Beach and donated much of their collection to the city before 1959, when Batista was deposed.

Wolfsonian-FIU (ENLARGE)

A storage facility holding the vast collection of Mitchell Wolfson Jr. got the ultimate face-lift when he renovated it into the Wolfsonian Museum. Among its industrial age treasures: an array of memorabilia from WorldÕs Fairs.

Morse Museum of American Art (ENLARGE)

The impressive Romanesque chapel, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, is the crown jewel of the Morse Museum, which has the most comprehensive collection of the artistÕs work.

Salvador Dal' Museum (ENLARGE)

Count this lobster telephone, created in 1936, among the eccentricities on display at the Salvador Dal' Museum in St. Petersburg.

Many wealthy art collectors have lived in Florida, and they left a precious legacy. Their private collections have become the nucleus for exceptional public museums in lavish settings.

The largest assemblage of the work of Salvador Dalí outside Spain and the most comprehensive collection of the creations of Louis Comfort Tiffany are among the prizes. Art lovers also will find top-notch traveling exhibits this winter along with the permanent collections.

Here are six art museums around the state that are worth a detour:

Daytona Beach: Museum of Arts and Sciences

Daytona Beach's Museum of Arts and Sciences has the largest collection of Cuban art outside Cuba.

During the time that Gen. Fulgencio Batista ruled Cuba, he and his second wife, Marta, maintained a home in Daytona Beach, where they housed their Cuban art. They donated much of the collection to the city before 1959, when Batista was deposed and fled to Spain and Portugal.

Cubans hoping to keep the artistic traditions of their homeland alive added to Batista's holdings, forming a rare national collection in exile. Among the exhibits are early maps, lithographs, paintings, furniture, ceramics and sculpture. The Museum of Arts and Sciences erected a new building in 1971 with a 2,000-square-foot wing devoted to Cuban art.

Also of note is the museum's large collection of American furniture, paintings and decorative arts such as silver and glass, an excellent gallery focusing on African art, a planetarium and the Center for Florida History.

Another Daytonian, Chapman Root, whose family developed the original Coca-Cola bottle, was responsible for a wing containing a wealth of Coca-Cola memorabilia, a complete 1840s apothecary and Root's personal collection of teddy bears.

Special exhibit: Feb. 16-May 20: "Anthony Quinn's Eye: A Lifetime of Creating and Collecting Art." The late actor was also an artist and avid collector, amassing more than 3,000 items from ancient Roman artifacts to modern art.

Miami Beach: The Wolfsonian

Some called him eccentric, but Mitchell Wolfson Jr. didn't care. He avidly collected until his wildly eclectic cache of late 18th- to mid-19th-century memorabilia grew to some 70,000 items — so large that he decided to buy the storage warehouse holding the collection and transform it into a museum of design.

When the building was completed and filled with furniture, glass, ceramics, sculptures, paintings, posters and photographs, Wolfson gave the museum to Florida International University, the current overseers.

This is a fascinating place. Among the specialties are the British Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements (1870-1910), highlighted by beautiful furniture by British masters such as William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

American industrial design (1915-1940) is represented by cameras, clocks, radios and phonographs, and there are interesting materials on changes in print advertising, including posters, graphic designs, patent models, trade catalogs and samples. Travel via ocean liners also caught Wolfson's voracious eye, along with airplanes, zeppelins and trains; World's Fairs; the works of the WPA in the 1930s and World War II propaganda.

Special exhibit: Through March 25: "Modernism in American Silver: 20th Century Design." Masterpieces from art deco to space age design.

St. Petersburg: Salvador Dalí Museum

The Salvador Dalí Museum has the world's most comprehensive private collection of the renowned Spanish artist's work.

It was compiled by the industrialist A. Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor, who were friends of the artist. The

Morses had begun showing the art in their hometown of Cleveland, but when that city hesitated to promise a permanent home for the collection, St. Petersburg stepped in and persuaded the couple to move their treasures south.

Housed in a modern building on the waterfront, the museum opened in 1982; the crowds necessitated an addition by 1989. Some 200,000 visitors arrive every year from all over the world, and an even larger building is being planned.

The collection of 95 oil paintings features excellent examples from Dalí's entire career, 1917 to 1970, including the surrealist canvases for which he is best known, and examples of his preoccupation with religion and science during his later classic period.

Special exhibit: Feb. 2-June 24: "Dalí & the Spanish Baroque." Spanish master paintings alongside Dalí works from the permanent collection.

Sarasota: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

Circus impresario John Ringling liked to do things in a big way. He amassed more than 600 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts and more than 25 rare tapestries during his lifetime.

His particular passion was Baroque painting and with his wife, Mable, he gathered important works by painters of the period including Rubens, Hals and Van Dyck. Ringling's best-known acquisition, the giant tapestries of Rubens' "Triumph of the Eucharist" series, fills an entire gallery.

The building Ringling constructed in 1927 to house his art is a veritable Mediterranean palace, with colonnaded loggias on three sides surrounding a courtyard filled with statues of Greek and Roman gods. He willed his estate and museum to the state, along with an endowment for new purchases, and the collection has grown to more than 10,000 objects, including an impressive Spanish gallery with paintings by El Greco and Velázquez. A new wing opening last February.

Now the official state art museum of Florida, the Ringling was put under the auspices of Florida State University in 2000. Also on the lavish 66-acre grounds overlooking Sarasota Bay are the exquisite Ringling mansion Cà d'Zan, a new circus museum featuring the world's largest miniature circus, gardens and a restored theater.

Special exhibits: Feb. 3-April 29: "Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings From the Corcoran Gallery of Art." Feb. 3-May 27: "Bedazzled: 5,000 Years of Jewelry From the Walters Art Museum."

West Palm Beach: Norton Museum of Art

When steel magnate Ralph Hubbard Norton and his wife, Elizabeth, left Chicago to retire to West Palm Beach in 1939, they decided to share their art collection with the public.

The gallery they opened in 1941 has more than doubled in size and owns more than 5,000 works encompassing 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, Chinese art and contemporary art and photography. A wing completed in 2003 added 14 galleries and an enclosed courtyard with a three-story atrium and glass ceiling installation by Tacoma, Wash., artist Dale Chihuly.

Norton was responsible for much of the museum's gallery of Chinese art, but he and his wife had wide interests and the collection includes masters such as Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Brancusi, Miró, Klee and Chagall.

A "wall of cubism" in the McGraw gallery showcases works by Picasso, Braque, De Chirico and Gris. Extensive American artwork includes Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.

Special exhibits: Through March 11: "Collecting the Impressionists: Masterpieces From the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute," works including Monet, Renoir, Degas; Feb. 10-May 6: "Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstractions," 40 works using circular motifs.

Winter Park: Morse Museum of American Art

The glorious Romanesque chapel designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago was a sensation and cemented Tiffany's international reputation.

It was saved from the ashes of Tiffany's Long Island, N.Y., estate, Laurelton Hall, which burned in 1957. Meticulously restored tile by tile, the chapel is the highlight of the Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, near Orlando.

This small museum boasts the world's most comprehensive collection of Tiffany's work (some of the collection is on special exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 20). Tiffany's beautiful "Four Seasons" leaded glass windows are in New York, but plenty of his lamps, jewelry, mosaics, pottery and paintings remain in Florida.

Though he is much admired today, Tiffany was out of fashion in the 1950s. But Hugh and Jeannette McKean, founders of the museum, were Tiffany admirers. When the artist's estate was ravaged by fire, they were considered foolish to buy the fragments. Today the treasures they gleaned from the ruins are worth tens of millions.

The museum was named for Jeannette McKean's grandfather, industrialist and philanthropist Charles Hosmer Morse, who made his winter home in Winter Park.

Special exhibit: Jan. 30-Sept. 16: "Rare Books and Works on Paper From the Morse Collection."

Eleanor Berman is the author of six nonfiction books and 12 travel guides, including "New York Neighborhoods," winner of the Independent Publishers award as best guidebook of the year.

IF YOU GO

About the museums

• Museum of Arts and Sciences, 352 S. Nova Road, Daytona Beach. 386-255-0285, www.moas.org. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sundays. $12.95 adults, $10.95 senior citizens, $6.95 ages 6-17, free under age 6.

• The Wolfsonian, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. 305-531-1001, www.wolfsonian.org. Noon-6 p.m. Mondays-Tuesdays, Saturdays-Sundays; noon-9 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays. $7 (plus Florida taxes) adults, $5 (plus Florida taxes) students with ID, senior citizens and ages 6-12. Free after 6 p.m. Fridays. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and July Fourth.

• Salvador Dalí Museum, 1000 Third St. S., St. Petersburg. 727-823-3767, www.salvadordalimuseum

.org. 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Mondays-Wednesdays and Saturdays; 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays; 9:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Fridays; noon-5:30 p.m. Sundays. $15 adults; $13.50 age 65 and older, military and police; $10 students ages 10-18; $4 children ages 5-9; free under age 5. $5 5-8 p.m. Thursdays.

• John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota. 941-359-5700, www.ringling.org. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. daily; closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. Admission (includes all properties), $15 adults, $13 senior citizens and active U.S. military, $5 students, free for children under age 5. On Mondays, Museum of Art is free, but admission is charged to other estate attractions.

• Norton Museum of Art, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach. 561-832-5196, www.norton.org. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; 1-5 p.m. Sundays. (Closed Mondays from May to October and major holidays.) $8 adults, $3 ages 13-21, free under 13.

• Morse Museum of American Art, 445 N. Park Ave., Winter Park. 407-645-5311, www.morsemuseum.org.

9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Saturdays; 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays, September through May, 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m June through August; 1-4 p.m. Sundays; closed major holidays except Easter and July Fourth. $3 adults, $1 students, free for children under age 12; all visitors free 4-8 p.m. Fridays, September through May.