The Louvre

The Louvre or in French “Le Musée du Louvre” is one of the wold’s largest and most famous museums and an absolute must-see for anyone in Paris. Recently, it was declared the most visited museum in the world with an shocking average amount of 15,000 visitors per day. The Louvre de Paris is located in the Louvre Palace, a building which has been extended an endless amount of times. Though, over the years, the building has been changed and somewhat modernized and doesn’t look a lot like it did originally, the museum was opened to the public during the French Revolution on August 10th, 1793.

The museum houses a collection of over one million art works, but only 35,000 are on display while the rest cannot be seen. In 1793, when the museum first opened its door, it only held 537 paintings and another 184 art works.  Currently, the most famous painting located in the museum is Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, but it also holds other world-famous paintings such as Pietá of Avignon, Hammurabi’s Code, Winged Victory of Samothrace or Venus de Milo and many

The museum is divided into the following eight categories:

Egyptian Antiquities

Near Eastern Antiquities

Greek, Etruscan and  Roman Antiquities

Islamic Art

Sculpture

Decorative Arts

Paintings

Prints and Drawings

The entrance to the Louvre museum is shaped like a large pyramid (21.6 meters tall) and its entrance is made from glass and metal surrounded by a group of three small pyramids. The current building was completed in 1989 and was designed by architect I. M. Pei.

An urban legend about the pyramid claims that the number of glass panes equals to 666, which is said to be the number of the beast. The myth strongly resurfaced upon the publication of Dan Brown’s book “The Da Vinci Code”, when Robert Landon has a discussion about François Mitterrand’s, the then president of France, desire to have exactly 666 panes on the pyramid.