Moments from Louvre

It was a royal palace for roughly six centuries before the revolutionary government opened it as a public museum in 1793, partly as a genuine democratic gesture and partly as a very pointed way of saying the king's collection now belonged to everyone. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid, controversial when it went up in 1989, is now so thoroughly the museum's public face that people forget it was once treated as an act of architectural vandalism against a beloved landmark. The building holds roughly 380,000 objects and shows about 35,000 at a time, spread across three wings on a scale that makes seeing "everything" in one visit a genuine impossibility, so it rewards picking a wing and letting the other two go.

Everyone ends up in the scrum around the Mona Lisa eventually, and there's no real way around that beyond arriving at opening or booking one of the Wednesday or Friday late-night slots, when the crowd thins considerably. But the more interesting move is to walk in the opposite direction from the crowd: the Near Eastern antiquities, the Islamic art galleries beneath the Cour Visconti, and the Richelieu wing's apartments of Napoleon III are all extraordinary and often nearly empty. Enter through the underground Carrousel du Louvre mall or the Porte des Lions when the pyramid line is long. The building itself, a former palace, is worth reading as you go: you're often standing in rooms designed to overwhelm a visiting ambassador, and they still do the job.