The National Gallery, on Bulevardi Dëshmorët e Kombit a short walk south of Skanderbeg Square, holds Albania's best collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century painting. The strongest rooms are the socialist realism gallery — heroic factory workers and partisans, larger than life, ideologically loud and visually fascinating — and the small Onufri room of sixteenth-century icons.
The contemporary section is patchy but worth a look for younger Albanian artists working in the wake of the Hoxha years. Allow an hour. Closed Mondays.