We returned to Paris in the afternoon of Friday, May 18. Our first stop was the Louvre, one of the world's most visited art museums, an historic monument, and a national symbol. We had a 2 ½ hour tour through this beautiful museum, hitting the highlights of the Louvre. They say if you spend 30 seconds on every artwork in this building for eight hours a day, seven days a week, you could be in this museum for three months. Of course, we did not have this much time, so we only saw the most famous things.

The building itself is really impressive. It is the largest museum in the world. It used to be the palace of the kings of France until Louis XIV moved it to Versailles (he didn’t want a hand-me-down palace). Many of the walls and ceilings are still painted like a royal palace. One thing I didn’t know before touring this museum: the Louvre was built on top of the foundation of another castle; actually, it was built on top of Richard the Lion Heart’s castle (the one in the Robin Hood stories). When they excavated underneath the Louvre during the Grand Louvre project to build the single entrance underground (the famous glass pyramid covers this entrance) during the 1980s, they discovered the foundation of the original castle. They kept this room open for tourists to see the outer wall of the castle and the inside wall of the moat (basically, we were able to walk through the inside of the original moat). It was really fascinating.

The museum is divided among eight curatorial departments, contains some of the world's most celebrated artworks and displays almost every genre of Western Art. In addition, the collection displays pieces of Egyptian, Oriental, and Islamic origin. Notable works include Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and Madonna of the Rocks; Jacques Louis David's Oath of the Horatii; Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People; and Alexandros of Antioch's Venus de Milo.