Louvre Museum Skip-the-Line Small-Group Guided Tour Paris

The Louvre: from royal palace to the world's most visited museum

The Louvre began as a fortress built around 1190 to protect the western edge of Paris, became a royal palace in the Renaissance and opened as a public museum in 1793, during the Revolution. Today it is the most visited museum in the world, with some 35,000 works on display across three wings, Denon, Sully and Richelieu, arranged around the Cour Napoléon and its glass Pyramid, added in 1989 as the main entrance. The galleries cover ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Near East, Islamic art, European sculpture, decorative arts and paintings up to the mid-19th century.

The scale is the reason a Louvre guided tour is worth it: the corridors run for kilometres and first-time visitors lose hours between the highlights. Your group enters through a separate entrance that skips the ticket line, passes security and goes straight to a route that links the masterpieces in a logical order, with the stories that make them memorable. The museum is closed on Tuesdays.

The Mona Lisa and the Italian galleries

The Mona Lisa hangs in the Salle des États on the first floor of the Denon wing, behind glass on its own wall so that the crowd can file past. Painted in Florence in the early 16th century and brought to France by the artist himself, it entered the royal collection and has been the museum's most famous work since the 19th century. The sitter's smile, the misty landscape and the painting's small size surprise most visitors, and your guide explains why it became so famous and how the 1911 theft sealed its celebrity.

To reach it you walk the Grande Galerie, the long hall built along the Seine to link the Louvre with the former Tuileries palace, lined with Italian Renaissance paintings. The Mona Lisa tour stop lasts about ten minutes, and the guide times it to avoid the densest crowd. On the ground floor below, the marble of Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss shows the neoclassical sculpture that French collectors loved.

The Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory and the Raft of the Medusa

Three works sum up the museum for most visitors. The Venus de Milo, a Greek marble of the 2nd century BC found on the island of Milos in 1820, stands in the Sully wing among the Greek antiquities, her missing arms part of the mystery. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a goddess landing on the prow of a ship, crowns the top of the Daru staircase in the Denon wing and is best seen from below as you climb. Both are on the route of this Louvre tour, and the guide explains how they were found and why they shaped European ideas of beauty.

In the large-format French painting rooms hangs the Raft of the Medusa, painted in 1819 after a real shipwreck off the African coast, when survivors drifted for days on a raft. The huge canvas caused a scandal for its realism and remains the most dramatic painting in the museum; about ten minutes are spent in front of it.

The Second Empire apartments and the medieval Louvre

Two parts of the route show the building rather than the collection. In the Richelieu wing, the state apartments of the Second Empire were fitted out in the 1850s and 1860s for the ministry that then occupied this wing: gilded ceilings, red velvet, crystal chandeliers, a grand dining room and a salon that could seat hundreds. They are the best surviving example of the opulent imperial style in Paris and a favourite stop on any Louvre tour, because they show how the palace looked when it was lived in.

Beneath the Sully wing, excavations in the 1980s uncovered the base of the original medieval fortress: the moat, the curtain wall and the foundations of the round keep that once stood at the centre. Walking along the moat floor you see the stonework of 12th and 14th-century Paris. The guide ends the two-hour tour here and leaves you free to explore the museum on your own.

After the tour: free time, opening hours and the Tuileries

The tour ends inside the museum, and your ticket lets you stay on. Many visitors use the time for the Egyptian galleries in the Sully wing, with the crypt of the Sphinx and the mummies, or the Islamic art department under its golden roof in the Cour Visconti, or the Apollo Gallery with the French crown diamonds. Louvre opening hours are 9:00 to 18:00 on most days with late openings on some evenings; it is closed on Tuesdays and on a few public holidays, so plan the rest of your day accordingly.

Outside, the Pyramid courtyard opens westward through the Carrousel arch to the Tuileries Garden, laid out in the 17th century, with its ponds, chairs and views up to Place de la Concorde. It is the natural place to rest after a Louvre visit, and the Palais-Royal gardens are a few minutes to the north. Lockers inside the museum take small bags; anything larger than 55 x 35 x 20 cm is not allowed in.