Louvre Museum, Art museum in Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, 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 building opens Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 9 AM to 6 PM, with extended hours until 9:45 PM on Wednesday and Friday, and tickets can be purchased online to reduce wait times. Metro stations Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre and Louvre-Rivoli are nearby, wheelchair access is available, and morning or evening visits often mean fewer people in the main galleries.
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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