As we continue our tour through Paris we have finally gotten to our visit to The Louvre Museum.
I remember the day we went to the Louvre it rained. It actually rained A LOT when we were in Paris.
One of the most famous buildings in Paris is the Louvre Art Museum. Just about EVERYONE knows what the Louvre is…and the paintings inside that make it famous! The most famous painting inside is of course The Mona Lisa.
And really that wasn’t even my favorite painting in the museum. Yeah it was cool to see “the original” but there are soo many copies and parodies of that painting it was pretty uneventful…and there was also about 100 people crowded around the tiny glassed in painting trying to take a picture. I think the COOLEST painting was when we turned around and saw this HUGE painting of the wedding at cana. OMG it took up the entire wall!!
My mom is like me with memories. She would remember the most bizarre things from when she went to Europe in 1980 with my dad. We turned around to look at the Wedding at Cana painting and we also took a few pictures. I might have been using the panorama feature..I don’t remember. While we were looking at it my mom says, “I remember seeing this painting when I was here with your Dad and the cameras back then were so bad compared to today, in order to take a picture of this huge painting you had to take 5 photos and pair them all together to get the whole thing after you developed your film.” It kind of goes to show how photography has changed over the years. My mom also thinks it’s weird when I [people] take pictures of their food
According to this documentary I watched about the Louvre they wanted to move this painting elsewhere but it was too big to move they just left it there because they didn’t feel like figuring out how to move it.
One thing that I found really interesting is we walked through a few hallways of different paintings. We saw Italian, French, and Spanish paintings. In the different cultures you could REALLY tell how religion influenced the lives of the Italians and Spanish. Most of those paintings involved Angels, Mary, Jesus, or the Apostles. The french paintings were more everyday and farming type paintings. It was an interesting observation.
The Louvre is HUGE…you could spend 3 days there and not even see everything there is to see. We saw the highlights and went off to do something else as we were only in Paris for 3 days.
If you are going to The Louvre anytime soon here is a secret. There are these lion statues to the right of the entrance. That is a short-cut entrance into the museum and it’s right near the Mona Lisa painting. The hours of that entrance vary though and of course it wasn’t opened the day we went.
If you want to wait HOURS on end you can go in via the Pyramid. However, there are these stairs near the lion and mini Arc de Triumph you can go down to the Carousel and go through this mall/shopping center that has an apple store. These instructions are probably not that good but now you have an idea of what to google if you ever go.
What we did was we went IN through the mall shortcut but when we left we left through the Pyramid since there is no line to leave and we were still able to see the pyramid which was pretty cool.
I recently found this BBC documentary on The Louvre that was really interesting that I recommend if you are interested in learning more about Paris and the history of the museum. There are also audio tour apps you can download and listen to even if you aren’t there. Great tips for Art Appreciation/history students!
We are officially 1/3 of the way through the 31 Days of Blogging challenge! If you need to catch up on my other 31 Days of Europe posts you can go to my landing page!