Louvre Museum 2-Hour Guided Tour with Pre-Reserved Tickets Paris

Place Colette, the Palais-Royal and the Louvre pyramid

The tour begins on Place Colette, the small square in front of the Comédie-Française, where Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre metro station opens through a canopy of coloured glass beads. Your guide waits in front of the café on the square holding a sign, and from here it is a three-minute walk through the Palais-Royal arcades or across Rue de Rivoli to the courtyard of the Louvre and its glass pyramid, the main entrance built in 1989 above an underground hall.

Because your Louvre tickets are pre-reserved with a priority time slot, you join the shorter entry line rather than the ticket queue; the security screening still applies to everyone. How to get to the Louvre meeting point: take metro lines 1 or 7 to Palais Royal and use exit 5, Place Colette, then turn round and the café is in front of you. Arrive early, as the tour cannot be joined once it has started.

Greek marble: the Venus de Milo, the Caryatids and the Winged Victory

The small group heads first into the Sully wing, the oldest part of the palace, where the Greek antiquities fill a long suite of galleries. The Venus de Milo, carved around 100 BC and found on the island of Milos in 1820, stands at the end with her missing arms and famous twisting pose, and with only six people around you the guide can walk you round her slowly. Next door is the Caryatids room, the sixteenth-century ballroom whose musicians' gallery rests on four stone women.

The route then climbs the Daru staircase to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the headless marble goddess landing on a ship's prow, discovered in 1863 and placed where the whole museum seems to converge. Is the Louvre worth visiting for its sculpture alone? This half hour makes the case, before the paintings begin.

The Grande Galerie, the Salon Carré and the Mona Lisa

From the staircase you enter the Denon wing and the Grande Galerie, the long corridor of Italian paintings that once connected the Louvre to the Tuileries palace. Your guide stops at the key works of the Italian Renaissance and at the refined Salon Carré, the square room that for two centuries hosted the great exhibitions of French painting and now shows early Italian altarpieces. The Salle des États, opening off the gallery, holds the Mona Lisa behind glass on her own wall.

The guide explains the portrait's thin layers of glaze, its 1911 theft and the reason it draws such crowds, then turns you to the Wedding Feast at Cana on the opposite wall, the largest canvas in the museum, which most visitors never look at. Allow around twenty-five minutes for this section, including the short wait to reach the front of the Mona Lisa barrier.

French Romanticism in the red rooms

Beside the Mona Lisa lie the red rooms of large-format French painting, where the guide spends about twenty minutes. The Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1818 and 1819, shows survivors of a real shipwreck piled on a raft at the moment they sight a sail, and it shocked Paris with its scale and its subject. Liberty Leading the People, painted after the July 1830 uprising, turned a street barricade into an allegory of the Republic.

Facing them is the enormous coronation scene of the imperial court, nearly ten metres wide, painted to record a ceremony in Notre-Dame with such precision that you can read the faces of the guests. In a small group you can stand close to the brushwork and ask about the figures; in a crowd of thirty you cannot. This is the part of the tour where art becomes the history of France.

Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss and the Italian sculpture gallery

The tour ends downstairs in the Denon wing's gallery of Italian sculpture, a long, light-filled room beside the river. Its centrepiece is Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, a neoclassical marble of 1793 in which the winged god lifts Psyche from her faint, carved so finely that the stone seems soft. Nearby stand the two unfinished marble Slaves by the Florentine Renaissance master, their bodies twisting out of the block, originally meant for a papal tomb.

After two hours the guided route finishes here, close to the exit below the pyramid, but your ticket lets you stay in the museum for the rest of the day as long as you do not leave the wing. Louvre opening hours run from nine in the morning, with closure on Tuesdays, and the Tuileries Garden next door is the ideal place to sit down afterwards.