Louvre Museum

About

The Louvre sits on the north bank of the Seine in the heart of Paris, making it one of the world's largest and most visited museums. Its total floor space exceeds 210,000 square meters, housing a permanent collection of over 380,000 works—around 35,000 on display at any given time—spanning from prehistoric artifacts dated to 7000 BCE to masterpieces of the mid-19th century. In a single visit, you can stand before an ancient Egyptian pharaoh's statue, decipher cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, gaze at Greek marble gods, and then lock eyes with the Mona Lisa across the hall. Few places on Earth compress the entire arc of human civilization into a single afternoon. But the Louvre was never built for the public. Its story begins in the 12th century as a military fortress guarding Paris against Viking raids. It was transformed into a royal palace by Charles V, who filled its towers with his library and called it home. François I brought Leonardo da Vinci from Italy—along with the Mona Lisa—kicking off the French royal family's centuries-long addiction to collecting art. Louis XIV turned it into the grandest statement of absolute power in European architecture, then abandoned it entirely when he relocated the court to Versailles. Napoleon was perhaps the most audacious curator in history: he stripped Italy, Egypt, and Spain of their greatest treasures, crammed them into the Louvre, and renamed it the Musée Napoléon in his own honor. When the Nazis marched on Paris in 1939, curator Jacques Jaujard orchestrated one of the most daring art rescues ever attempted—convoys of trucks slipping out under cover of darkness, spiriting the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo to châteaux scattered across rural France. They returned after liberation, silent witnesses to a war the world nearly lost. The glass pyramid you enter today is not just a roof—it is a threshold between the present and eight hundred years of kings, revolution, and humanity's relentless hunger for beauty.