Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition at Luxor Las Vegas

What Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition does so well, and movies cannot, is to humanize the tragedy through displays of bits and pieces of the detritus from the breakup of a 46,328-ton ocean liner jammed with cargo and the personal belongings of more than 2,000 souls.

Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition at Luxor Resort and Casino
3900 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, NV 89119
800-557-7428 or 702-262-4400
See the Titanic- The Artifact Exhibition website

Hours of Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition: Open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; last admission at 9 p.m.

Admission for Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition: $27 for adults, $25 for seniors, $20 for children 12 and under, $24 for Nevada residents and Luxor hotel guests. Combination tickets with other Luxor attractions also available.

About Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition

Thanks to Leo and Kate -- not to mention James Cameron and nearly a century of other films and literature -- we're all pretty familiar with the basic story of the sinking of RMS Titanic in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, claiming the lives of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board. Moreover, Cameron's 1997 Titanic film did a thorough job of walking viewers through the ship itself, satisfying the "you are there" desires of millions of moviegoers.

Upon entering the exhibit every visitor received a boarding pass with the name and brief biography of a Titanic passenger, and it's with a growing sense of real dread that you pass through the galleries and ponder the fate of "your" passenger -- an actual person like newlywed Henry William Frauenthal, a New York orthopedic surgeon returning from France with his wife, Clara, and his brother, Issac. (Remarkably, all three survived the Titanic sinking.)

The exhibit at the Luxor contains about 300 of the approximately 3,000 items retrieved from the Titanic wreck site 2,000 feet deep in the North Atlantic. Highlights of the tour include a manmade iceberg, a recreated section of the ship's promenade deck -- which provides a sense of the dark and chilly conditions in which the ship sank -- and the "big piece," a 25-x-15-foot section of the Titanic's shattered hull, complete with some intact porthole glass.

The technology and effort it took to lift this 20-ton relic to the surface makes it a marvel to behold, and the exhibit certainly lends a sense of both the size of the Titanic and the scale of the tragedy. In the end, however, it's the little pieces that visitors can relate to on a personal level: the intact pieces of china, a box of perfume samples belonging to a traveling salesman, and the personal testimonials of the survivors.

Even nearly 100 years later, with all 2,223 Titanic passengers and crew now dead, it's a story that still compels, and makes a visit to this exhibition a worthwhile stop on any Las Vegas visit.

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