RBI Monetary Museum

Most visitors to Fort walk straight past it. On the ground floor of Amar Building, a working office block on Sir Phirozshah Mehta Road, the Reserve Bank of India keeps the country's only museum given over entirely to money.

• It opened in the mid-2000s, admission is free, the galleries are air-conditioned and — unusually for central Mumbai — rarely crowded.
• Allow an hour and you leave with the loose change in your pocket reframed as the tail end of a story roughly two and a half thousand years long.
• It is one of the city's best-value rainy-afternoon stops, and one of the few museums here that a curious ten-year-old and an economics student can enjoy at the same pace. The displays run broadly chronologically.
• Early cases hold cowrie shells and punch-marked karshapanas — thin silver pieces stamped with suns, hills and animals rather than portraits — followed by Indo-Greek and Kushan issues and the gold dinars of the Guptas, whose kings appear hunting, playing the veena or performing sacrifices.
• Sultanate and Mughal coinage brings in the silver rupiya whose name and weight the modern rupee still carries, and the colonial-era section traces presidency and princely-state issues into the notes of the twentieth century.
• The quietest cases are often the most interesting: hand-written hundis, the indigenous credit instruments that moved merchant money across India long before cheques, alongside material on the design of the modern banknote, its security features and the making of the rupee symbol.
• A closing section covers cashless payments, which in a country that now taps and scans for everything reads almost as history already.
• This is a working central-bank premises, so expect a security check at the door; photography is generally not permitted and you may be asked to leave bags and phones with the guard, so travel light and confirm at the entrance.
• The museum sits in the heart of heritage Fort, an easy stroll from Flora Fountain, Horniman Circle Gardens, the stepped facade of the Asiatic Society and the Gothic pile of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus — it slots neatly into a morning walking loop rather than being a destination in its own right.
• For food, Fort and neighbouring Kalbadevi are among the better parts of Mumbai for vegetarian eating, though the area is mixed and plenty of kitchens here also cook fish, meat or egg, so read the board and ask before you order.
• The reliable pattern is the Gujarati and Marwari thali houses around Fort and Kalbadevi, where an unlimited lunch plate of rotli, shaak, dal, kadhi, rice and a sweet arrives between noon and about three; several long-running ones advertise themselves as pure vegetarian, and it is worth confirming at the counter.
• Udupi-style South Indian cafes scattered through the lanes near Horniman Circle do filter coffee, idli and crisp dosas from morning onwards, and street carts around Fort's office blocks sell vada pav, sandwiches and fresh sugarcane juice — pick a cart handling only vegetarian fillings.
• Jain travellers will find several thali kitchens in this belt willing to cook without onion and garlic if asked in advance.