Louvre Museum Guided Tour with Mona Lisa & Iconic Masterpieces Paris

The Kiosque des Noctambules and the Palais-Royal

The tour begins at the Kiosque des Noctambules, the metro entrance on the Place Colette made of coloured glass beads on aluminium frames, installed in 2000 for the centenary of the Paris metro and facing the columns of the Comédie-Française, the national theatre founded in 1680. It is one of the easiest meeting points in Paris to recognise and sits directly above the Palais Royal – Musée du Louvre station on lines 1 and 7. A few steps away are the arcades and garden of the Palais-Royal, the 17th-century palace whose courtyard is filled with striped black-and-white columns.

From the kiosk the guide walks the group for about five minutes across the Place du Palais-Royal and through the Cour Napoléon to the glass pyramid, explaining how the Louvre grew from a fortress into the largest palace in Europe. Please do not go to the museum on your own, because the pre-reserved tickets are issued to the group as a whole.

The Louvre Palace and the pyramid entrance

The Louvre is the former residence of the kings of France, begun as a fortress around 1190, rebuilt as a Renaissance palace from 1546 and extended by almost every ruler until the 19th century, which is why the building is nearly a kilometre long. The collection was opened to the public in 1793, during the Revolution, and now runs from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia to European painting of the mid-19th century, with around 35,000 works on display across the Denon, Sully and Richelieu wings. The glass pyramid in the central courtyard, inaugurated in 1989, is the main entrance and the symbol of the modern museum.

With your pre-reserved ticket you pass through the pyramid security line and descend to the hall beneath it, where the three wings begin. A Louvre guided tour of two hours cannot show everything, so your guide follows the highlights route and keeps the group moving at a comfortable pace, using headsets so that nobody misses an explanation.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Daru staircase

The first great encounter of the route is the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the marble figure of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, carved around 190 BC to stand on the prow of a ship in a sanctuary on the island of Samothrace. Discovered in pieces in 1863 and reassembled, she has stood at the top of the Daru staircase since 1884, where the light from above and the sweep of the stairs make her the most dramatic sight in the museum. Her wings and wind-pressed drapery are among the finest achievements of Hellenistic sculpture.

The guide pauses here for about ten minutes to explain how the statue was found, why she has no head or arms and how the museum restored her between 2013 and 2014. The staircase is also the crossroads of the Denon wing, leading on to the Italian paintings on one side and the Galerie d'Apollon on the other.

The Mona Lisa and the Italian Renaissance

The Grande Galerie, the long corridor along the Seine that was once the route between the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace, holds the Italian paintings from the 13th to the 17th century, and it leads to the Salle des États, where the Mona Lisa hangs alone on a wall facing the enormous Wedding Feast at Cana. The portrait was painted in Florence between about 1503 and 1506 and came to France with the royal collection; its theft from the Louvre in 1911 and recovery two years later turned it into the most famous painting in the world.

Your guide explains why the picture is so small, how its soft shading and the smile were achieved, and the best way to approach the viewing area without wasting time in the crowd. Around it are the other Renaissance masterpieces of the room and the great French canvases of the 19th century in the neighbouring galleries, which the route visits next. Expect about forty minutes in this part of the museum.

The Venus de Milo and the Greek galleries

The Venus de Milo is the most famous statue of the Louvre and the centrepiece of the Greek antiquities in the Sully wing. Found by a farmer on the island of Milos in 1820 and carved around 150 to 125 BC, she represents Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and her missing arms have been the subject of guesses for two centuries. The galleries around her hold Greek vases, bronzes and marbles from the archaic period to the Roman copies that preserved lost Greek originals, and the Salle des Caryatides, the Renaissance ballroom supported by four sculpted women.

The guide spends about twenty-five minutes in this part of the museum, telling the stories of the works and pointing out lesser-known pieces that most visitors pass without a glance. From here the route descends to the lower level of the Sully wing, where the oldest part of the Louvre waits.

The medieval Louvre beneath the palace

Under the Sully wing, excavations in the 1980s uncovered the base of the fortress that stood here from around 1190: the moat, the massive round keep and the walls of the castle that defended Paris from attack along the Seine. You walk along the bottom of the moat between stone walls several metres thick, see the pier of the old drawbridge and the foundations of the keep, and understand how the city has risen around the building over eight centuries. A model shows the fortress as it looked in the Middle Ages.

This is where the two-hour guided tour usually ends, close to the exit beneath the pyramid. Note that once you have left the wings and are under the pyramid you cannot re-enter the galleries, so decide with your guide whether you want to stay longer inside; the Louvre closes at 18:00, or at 21:00 on Wednesdays and Fridays.