14-05-2025
The secret life of the Louvre: inside the world's biggest museum
While reading Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino's entertaining deep dive into the history — and dusty cellars — of the revered Paris institution, I experienced a flashback to my teenage years. One summer in the late 1980s, I moped — dragging my feet, vocally miserable — on a family tour of the museum's interminable galleries, gardens and corridors, and a seemingly endless assortment of Louis-the-somethings and Charles-the-whatevers. For a whole day.
Sciolino sympathises. The subtitle of her book — How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum — could be read as a plea for patience. 'The museum exhibits more than 30,000 works of art in more than 780,000 sq ft of exhibition space,' she writes, making it the biggest museum
