If, in the words of the City Manager, Eddie Breen, Waterford is "a bit of a hidden gem", its heirlooms have been reset in splendour.
Waterford Treasures was opened to the public yesterday after a formal opening ceremony on Monday.
This is later than expected, but the quality of the items to be displayed and the care which has gone into creating the perfect environment for them excuse the delay and enhance the expectation.
Even allowing for the understandable chauvinism both of Eddie Breen and of the city's history consultant, Eamonn McEneaney - the best, the first, the latest, the rarest, the longest and the best-preserved of everything seems to have been in Waterford - this is a venture difficult to criticise.
It unites a derelict Victorian grain store on the quay - from now on called the Granary - with artefacts whose history unscrolls the centuries.
By removing all six floors at one side of the building and leaving only four on the other, the architects, Ahrends Burton Koralek, have created a vast atrium through which visitors may travel in a glass elevator almost as if through time.
Waterford had a troubled early life even before it was the scene of that dramatically-arranged marriage, the wedding of Strongbow and Aoife, daughter of the vengeful MacMorrough.
As a Danish settlement (although the town existed in some shape long before the ninth century and the emergence of Sitric) it was a terror to its neighbours, and its walls were built under the aegis of Reginald, whose sway reached as far as York. Its first cathedral, after the Vikings accepted Christianity, was built late in the 11th century.
The early ferocities of the resistant Irish and the invasive Danes were rivalled through the centuries after the Normans; Strongbow's aide and accomplice, Raymond le Gros, is buried at Molana, an island in the Blackwater, and it was at the mouth of the Suir river that Henry II arrived in 1172.
Waterford's City Manager may now be tackling the problems of what is called "corridor" tourism - the fate of a location seen only from the windows of coaches taking tourists from the ferry-ports to the west - but Waterford had nothing of the corridor identity in those earlier times so brilliantly evoked at the Granary.
James II left for France, and two weeks later William of Orange left for the throne of England, from these quays.
The combination of quiet excitements and jewelled or printed glamour among the treasures now revealed are a reminder of the centrality of this city to Irish history through the last millennium and before it.
Time-lapse cameras activated by floor-pads bring screens and panels to life. As one walks over the glazed flooring-blocks they become light boxes which reveal models of city buildings.
The ecclesiastical heritage of stone, timber and vestments is housed in a vaulted and pillared replica of the medieval cathedral, with the Flemish embroidery of the Magi Cope glowing like a sacrament.
A whole wall becomes the illuminated Charter Roll and another carries pages from the Chronicles of the Waterford Franciscan, Thomas Clyn, a despairing voice from the void of a monastery annihilated by the Black Death of 1349.
Here are the splendid ceremonial royal swords (one from Edward IV), an arrowhead from Strongbow's army and a cannon - small, almost as a toy - from one of several sieges.
A six-year excavation yielded Viking artefacts from fire-pots to casket-pieces carved from the ribs of cattle, from snaffle-bits to sewing-needles and harness-bell.
A facsimile palisade has drawers which slide out to show the slender lattice of a dog-collar in copper alloy, lined with velvet or leather according to the hound's rank.
Embroidered with gilt roses on a ground of velvet the Cap of Maintenance was awarded to William Wyse, subsequently mayor, for his service to Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Quakers, glass-blowers, priests and patriots hover in niches or inhabit whole landings here; Cromwell, the Confederate Wars, Luke Wadding and Thomas Meaghar all have their place.
At a cost of £4.7 million, shared by Waterford Corporation, the ERDF and the Department of the Environment, this project is not a heritage centre so much as a carefully-arranged treasure-house.
Its aim is multi-purpose - conservation and display, educational and tourism-related.
Its corporate sponsors at Waterford Glass enjoy 350,000 visitors a year, and Eddie Breen hopes, in time, to convince at least half that number to stay in the town a little longer.