The Louvre, as a museum, is celebrating its 220th anniversary. But the site dates back 800 years, to the first medieval building created by Philippe Auguste, the foundations of which you can still see today.
It's the most visited museum in the world, beating out the #2 (National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.) by 2.1 million visitors annually. Oddly enough, for all those visitors, the Louvre's Twitter account only has 64,557 visitors as of November 2013. The Louvre's Facebook page is doing a bit better, with 1.1 million "likes", putting it at #2 behind MOMA in New York (Museum of Modern Art). Which makes me now want to go and check out the MOMA Facebook page to see what's so interesting, since MOMA isn't even in the top 5 most visited museums. Social networking-wise, they must be doing something right.
There are roughly 35,000 works on exhibit... but the Louvre actually has 460,000 works in total. There are 403 rooms and 14.5km of rooms and corridors. It would take you 64 days to see it all, if you looked at each piece for 1 minute. (Who has that kind of time? Or stamina? Yeah. Not me.) However, if you're pressed for time, you could see the top 3 most visited works (the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory, plus a lovely assortment of other works, in about 90 minutes. I've actually done it. You just need to stick to the Denon wing and have a good map. They also rent a few decent audio tours that last anywhere from 90 minutes to 2 hours. So, you don't have to be overwhelmed by it all.
So much to see, so little time. And turns out, I found this article a little too late in the day to catch the "Inside the Louvre" series on CNN tonight in my time zone - but maybe it will be available again in your area (or mine).
