The Uffizi: the world's best art gallery?

What's your favourite art gallery? Mine is a bit of a cliche, I'm afraid.

The art museums that really haunt you, that you can fall in love with, are not necessarily the most comprehensive, best equipped or best run. The Louvre is a great museum – arguably beyond compare in the range, scale and quality of its collections – but it's a hard place to love. It is almost too grand for that. Our own National Gallery is another museum that is profoundly admirable and brilliantly useful, but somehow lacks romance.

Among the museums I love are the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Prado in Madrid, and the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I would include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but its redesign has left it less lovable.

At the Met, the encyclopaedic range – encompassing everything from Jackson Pollock to medieval armour – is as dazzling as at the Louvre, but there place itself has more quirkiness, more personality. It's a combination of architecture, its Central Park setting and eccentric abundance that makes it so special. The Hermitage has these same qualities with an even more spectacular setting (beside the river Neva), and a darker history as the stage of the October revolution.

Many people would, I suspect, rate the Prado the world's greatest art museum. Its character is intense. No other great gallery has such a specific and atmospheric collection. The Prado is based on the Spanish royal collection, from which it inherited the greatest works of Bosch, Velázquez and Goya, as well as supreme paintings by Titian and Rubens. Because Spain in the 19th and 20th centuries was in no position to collect art, the Prado kept its original shape, reflecting the history of taste in Spain in a very resonant way. And it's a great, old-fashioned place to visit.

But it's not my favourite. My favourite is, as I say, a cliche: a museum you have to queue for, because so many other people want to see its exhibits, which include Botticelli's Venus. It's the Uffizi in Florence.

The Uffizi is just magical. It's one of the world's oldest art galleries: this summer there was an extra queue for its oldest exhibition space, the Tribuna, a domed, jewel-encrusted hall hung with Bronzino portraits. Its collection originated in the collections of the Medici family, and goes back to the 16th, even the 15th century. And it is full of incomparable art, from the paintings of Giotto and Duccio to Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi and Caravaggio's Medusa. It has fascinating frescoes in its corridors and a view across the river Arno. There's even a cafe terrace looking out over the Florence skyline.

The gallery is in the midst of a rebuilding programme that will surely enhance its reputation. Most of its highlights have been in the same city since they were created, yet almost all are central to the history of art. It is a work of art in itself.