Louvre Museum, Art museum in the 1st arrondissement, Paris, France
This national museum extends along the Seine across three wings with galleries on multiple floors. The collection holds over 380,000 artworks divided into eight departments, including Egyptian antiquities, Greek sculptures, and European paintings, with exhibition rooms displaying objects from ancient civilizations through the mid-1800s.
A medieval fortress occupied this site before the building became a royal residence starting in 1546 under Francis I. After the French Revolution, authorities opened it as a public museum in 1793, with several expansions during the 1800s and 1900s incorporating neighboring structures.
Visitors come here to see works they first encountered in textbooks or documentaries, standing face to face with the originals. School groups move through the halls with worksheets, while others sit on the floor sketching or simply spend long moments in front of a single painting.
The museum has been closed on Tuesdays since its post-war reopening in 1946, and is habitually open the rest of the week apart from some holidays. The main entrance since 1993 is the underground Hall Napoléon beneath the glass pyramid, reached from the pyramid, the Carrousel du Louvre mall or the passage Richelieu; a secondary entrance at the Porte des Lions is not permanently open. Métro Louvre–Rivoli and Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre serve the site, the latter with direct underground access to the Carrousel. Cameras are allowed but flash photography is forbidden.
The glass pyramid entrance designed by architect I. M. Pei opened in 1989 and leads into an underground complex beneath Cour Napoléon. The structure consists of 603 rhombus-shaped glass segments and 70 triangular segments forming a complex geometric pattern.
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