The Flaske-Peters Samling, in a courtyard off Smedegade in Ærøskøbing, is one of those museums you visit out of curiosity and leave genuinely impressed. The collection contains around 750 ships in bottles, plus models of churches, windmills, and entire harbour scenes — all built inside glass containers that should not, by any logic, accommodate them.
Peter was a sailor and a cook, not a trained craftsman, and his earliest bottles are charmingly rough. The later ones are extraordinary. The museum also displays his tools and explains, with diagrams, how the rigging is collapsed for insertion and then pulled upright with thread. It is a small place and a short visit, but it is the kind of obsessive single-purpose museum that justifies the ferry crossing on its own.