Louvre Museum

Museum · Louvre (1st)Paris,France

A former royal palace in Paris, now the world's largest art museum, entered through a glass pyramid, its medieval fortress still standing in the basement.

The Louvre fills a former royal palace, and its scale is the first thing you meet. Corridors run for miles, tens of thousands of works reach from Egyptian mummies to Renaissance masters, and a single day barely scratches one wing. You enter through I. M. Pei's glass pyramid into a light-filled hall, then choose a direction. Most visitors funnel toward a small guarded painting behind glass, where a scrum of raised phones surrounds the Mona Lisa. Walk away from her and the corridors empty out: a gallery of Mesopotamian carvings with nobody in it, the Winged Victory at the head of her staircase, the Egyptian rooms most people never reach. It began as a fortress, and its medieval moat and keep still stand in the basement beneath the crowds. Kings enlarged the building wing by wing across nearly seven centuries, turning a defensive castle into a sprawling palace, until the Revolution flung its doors open in 1793 and made the nation's treasures public. Pei's pyramid was bitterly opposed when it went up and now marks the museum's heart. It was sized for four million visitors a year and takes nine, so a second entrance is being cut beneath the east colonnade, due to open by 2031.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The palace hides upstairs — slip into the Napoleon III apartments, all gilt, crimson and chandeliers, and you meet the Louvre as a royal residence, usually near-empty while the crowds chase paintings.
Pick one wing, not the whole map — the collection is too vast to conquer. Choosing Egypt or the Dutch masters and going deep beats a forced march past everything.
The glass-roofed sculpture courts stay calm — the Cour Marly and Cour Puget, full of daylight and marble, sit just off the main route yet most visitors never drift in.

Things to do

1
Descend to the oldest Louvre
Head down to the lower level and walk the dry moat of the original fortress. Follow the pale base of the medieval keep, feel the temperature drop, and stand where the castle's drawbridge once met the water — the first Louvre, hidden beneath all the later ones.
2
See the Mona Lisa, then turn away
Join the funnel toward the Mona Lisa, hold your spot for a minute, then turn round. Behind you on the opposite wall hangs Veronese's Wedding at Cana, almost ten metres across and nearly seventy square metres of canvas, drawing a fraction of the crowd. Two more Leonardos hang in the long gallery next door, the Virgin of the Rocks and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
3
Climb to the Winged Victory
Find the Daru staircase and stop at its foot before you climb. Look at the drapery: it is carved wet, pressed flat on one leg and blown clear of the other. Then go up slowly and watch the twist of the body come round as your angle changes.
4
Find the pyramid that hangs upside down
Go down into the Carrousel, the underground hall between the Métro and the museum entrance, and look up where the two walkways cross. A second glass pyramid hangs point down from the ceiling. A small stone pyramid stands on the floor beneath it, and the two tips stop just short of touching.