Museo del Louvre - Entrada con horario reservado

I returned to the Louvre for the first time since I was a teenager, this time with my own family. The museum is as fantastic as I remember. Many people visit it just to see the Mona Lisa and maybe take a selfie with it. Suit yourself, I prefer the greek sculptures, the Egyptian exhibits, and the Flemish painters. The museum itself is a museum, the architecture is superb. The only thing I don't like is the early closing hour.

Once upon a time, the Louvre was a place to contemplate some of the masterpieces of Western art with a reasonable degree of tranquility. Now, it's a theme park with designated must-have selfie stops where no one really settles long enough to appreciate anything, and viewing the paintings and sculptures themselves often means shouldering through throngs of headset-wearing gawkers. At peak times (which is nearly always), the corridors resound with shopping mall clamor. I spent nearly a year in Paris in 2022 and visited this museum precisely once, and then only to view a specialty exhibition at a gallery far removed from the usual traffic. Even then, the process of entering and exiting through -- guess what? a street-level shopping mall, proved mildly soul-destroying.

It is so magnificent and deep. One can easily spend there much time - to digest the miracle. We were there in the morning and thanks to our online tickets it took us about 15 minutes with all the security and hygiene formalities to get there.