Louvre Museum, Ile-de-France, France

5Enrico Florentino 5:00 PM Jan 6, 2023

So worth it
Honestly I didn’t have much expectations for the Louvre and thought that it was going to be an overrated experience, but gladly, I was very much wrong. For me, this museum beat the British museum and took its spot as my favourite one. It’s stylish, enormous (you can easily get lost there without a map) and full of the most beautiful art on earth (even excluding the most famous and hyped ones, such as La Gioconda). If I lived in Paris I would for sure become a member of the museum and visit it multiple times per month. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, but I do recommend arriving early and staying as long as possible for people who only have a single day to visit it. There are also restaurants and cafes inside the museum if you want to have lunch, although they were a bit on the expensive side, even for Parisian standards.

4Brian M 5:00 PM Oct 2, 2022

Brilliant collection, poorly managed
The Louvre is apparently the biggest museum in the world: not only is it an amazing building but houses antiquities as well as art, so along with the Eiffel tower it simply has to be seen if you go to Paris. I love Assyrian art and the Louvre's collection of Persian / Assyrian art is almost as good as the British Museum's (ethical considerations aside). Negatives: well, time has not been kind to the courtyard pyramid, which is completely out of keeping with the surroundings. The space provided by the pyramid is more quantity over quality: once inside we wondered around this vast space looking for (a) a map and (b) audio guide - notices for the latter all said vaguely 'to the left' - no matter where you stood in a space the size of 2 football pitches! You need to get a ticket in the bottom of the foyer to then go back to pick up an audio guide, for which you get no instructions. It is basically a NIntendo 3DS , so it has lots of buttons and was extremely fiddly. It also only covers a tiny fraction of the works on display. We stopped using it but even returning it is not made easy with only one poorly displayed return desk. At only 5 euro I don't begrudge the money, but after trekking around trying to obtain the guide, we were knackered before we had even seen our first painting. The main attraction has to be the Mona Lisa: but to see this you have to queue to get into the Louvre, queue to get to the relevant wing (Denon) and then queue to see the painting itself. It sounds worse than it is but I would suggest missing the scrum and seeing some of the other mosterpieces in the Italian collection (the best French artwork is in Musee D'Orsay, which houses Impressionists - it is smaller, just as beautiful inside and more manageable). Top tip? Well, I don't know if timed tickets are worth it: we bought tickets in advance and were shepherded into a huge queue which, to be fair, started to move bang on time, but not a minute before; meanwhile plenty of people without tickets sailed past us into the museum. This was on a Friday in September: it might be different on a weekend in the height of summer.