The Tallinn City Museum occupies a 14th-century merchant house on Vene Street, in the heart of the Old Town. The permanent exhibition covers the history of Tallinn from medieval trading post to Soviet city to modern capital, with good collections of household objects, costumes, and documents that give the city's social history a tangible quality.
The building itself is part of the interest — the medieval vaulted rooms and wooden interior details survive largely intact, and walking through the house gives a real sense of the scale of life in a prosperous 14th-century Tallinn merchant family. One of the more understated but worthwhile museums in the Old Town.