The Relief Map Museum (Musée des Plans-Reliefs) in Paris is one of my favorite sights anywhere. It has about 30 big, meticulously detailed scale models of towns, ports and forts and their surrounding landscapes. The models were built for military planning purposes from the 1670s to the 1870s.
In another room they show how they made the models, for example, grass and foliage were made of silk fibers trimmed into tiny bits using this device.
