Louvre Museum

The world's largest and most visited art museum

Address Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris
Admission €22; free first Fri of the month 6–9:45pm for under-26s
Opening Hours Mon, Thu, Sat–Sun 9am–6pm; Wed, Fri 9am–9:45pm; closed Tue
Website www.louvre.fr

The Louvre is the world's most visited museum and one of its greatest — a former royal palace whose 35,000 works span 9,000 years of human civilisation. The building itself is extraordinary: a harmonious mix of Renaissance and 19th-century wings wrapped around I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, which opened controversially in 1989 and is now beloved.

Go in with a plan or the scale will defeat you. The Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Mona Lisa are the non-negotiables, but they draw enormous crowds. The Vermeer and Dutch Golden Age rooms on the second floor of the Richelieu wing are often uncrowded and breathtaking. The Mesopotamian antiquities — including the Code of Hammurabi — are endlessly fascinating and almost deserted.

Book tickets online and arrive at opening to beat the worst of the queues. A visit of three to four hours covers the highlights without museum fatigue setting in. If you have a Paris Museum Pass, use the Richelieu entrance to skip the main pyramid queue.

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A story
The Mona Lisa is displayed behind bulletproof glass not because of theft — though it was famously stolen in 1911 and missing for two years — but because in 1956 a visitor threw acid at the lower half of the painting. The thief, an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, hid in a closet overnight, walked out with the painting under his coat, and kept it in his apartment in Florence for more than two years before being caught.