Louvre Travel Video Guide

Louvre Travel Itinerary

• Maps and flag of France
• Louvre travel photos
• Louvre travel forum
• Flights to Louvre
• Hotels in Louvre
• Hostels in Louvre
• Buy the guide book!

Paris's largest monument is the Louvre , for centuries the site of the French court, and renowned today as one of the world's greatest art galleries. It began life as a fortress, built by Philippe-Auguste in 1200 as a place to store his scrolls, jewels and swords. Charles V was the first French king to actually live there, but it wasn't until the reign of Francois I, in the mid-sixteenth century, that the foundations of the palace were laid and the fortress demolished. From then on, almost every sovereign added to it. Twice, it came very close to being demolished. The first occasion was under Louis XIV, when Bernini was very nearly hired to redesign the palace. His proposal was to raze it to the ground and start from scratch, but fortunately, he lost the commission. The palace's other close shave came in the mid-eighteenth century, when the Louvre was taken over by artists and squatters; over a hundred different families lived around the cour Carree. Louis XV's response was to call for its immediate destruction, but he was eventually dissuaded by his officials.

Every alteration and addition up to 1988 created a surprisingly homogeneous building, with a grandeur, symmetry and Frenchness entirely suited to this most historic of Parisian edifices. Then came the most recent addition, made by President Mitterrand as part of his Grand Louvre renovation project - a huge glass pyramid, set bang in the centre of the cour Napoleon. It was an extraordinary leap of daring and imagination. Conceived by the Chinese-born architect Ieoh Ming Pei, it has no connection to its surroundings, save as a symbol of symmetry. Mitterrand also managed to persuade the Finance Ministry to move out of the northern Richelieu wing. Its two courtyards were roofed over in glass and now house the museum's French sculpture and the Objets d'Art collections. A public passageway, the passage Richelieu , linking the cour Napoleon with rue de Rivoli, allows you to look down into these courtyards.

Mitterrand's project also dramatically extended the Louvre underground, with the entrance hall, the Hall Napoleon , beneath the Pyramid, leading into a series of galleries known as the Carrousel du Louvre . Smart shops, restaurants, exhibition and conference spaces fill the vast spaces, and an inverted glass pyramid lets in light from place du Carrousel.

Napoleon's pink marble Arc du Carrousel , just east of place du Carrousel, which originally formed a gateway for the former Palais des Tuileries, has always looked a bit out of place; now it

is definitively and forlornly upstaged by the Pyramid.

The Palais du Louvre itself houses four museums : the Musee du Louvre; the Musee de la Mode et du Textile; the Musee des Arts Decoratifs; and the Musee de la Publicite. Each has been revamped under the Grand Louvre project, and each is an important collection in its own right, but the most renowned by far - and the reason to come to Paris for many of its visitors - is the mighty Musee du Louvre .

Your Tips For Louvre

• Burgundy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Peaceful, rural Burgundy is one of the most prosperous regions in modern France, but for centuries its powerful dukes remained independent of the French crown. - France
  

• Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic Coast France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  News-stands selling Sud-Ouest remind you where you are: this is not the Mediterranean, certainly, but in summer the quality of the light, the warm air, the fields of sunflowers and the shuttered siesta-silence of the farmhouses give you the first exciting promises of the south. - France
  

• Corsica France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Around one-and-three-quarter million people visit Corsica each year, drawn by a climate that's mild even in winter and by some of the most astonishingly diverse landscapes in Europe. - France
  

• Normandy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Though now firmly incorporated into the French mainstream, the seaboard province of Normandy has a history of prosperous independence as one of the crucial powers of medieval Europe. - France
  

• Alps France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Rousseau wrote in his Confessions , "I need torrents, rocks, pine trees, dark forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices at my elbow to give me a good fright", and he certainly found what he was looking for in the Alps . - France
  

• Cote dAzur France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The Cote d'Azur polarizes opinions like few other places in France. - France
  

• North France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  When conjuring up exotic holiday locations, you're unlikely to light upon the north of France. - France
  

• Rhone valley and Provence France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Of all the areas of France, Provence is the most irresistible. - France
  

• Paris France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  It's little wonder that so many wistful songs have been penned over the years about France's capital, Paris . - France
  

• Loire France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The density of chateaux and all their great Renaissance intrigues and associations can prove quite intimidating, but if you pick your castles selectively, rid yourself of a sense of duty to guided tours and spend days on river banks with supplies of cheese, fruit and white Loire wines, the Loire can be one of the most enjoyable of all French regions. - France
  

• Massif Central France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  One of the loveliest spots on earth ? a country without roads, without guides, without any facilities for locomotion, where every discovery must be conquered at the price of danger or fatigue ? a soil cut up with deep ravines, crossed in every way by lofty walls of lava, and furrowed by numerous torrents . - France
  

• Brittany France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  No one area - and certainly no one city or town - in Brittany encapsulates the character of the province; that lies in its people and in its geographical unity. - France
  

• Alsace-Lorraine and the Jura mountains France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  France's eastern frontier provinces, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comte , where the Jura mountains lie, have had a complex and tumultuous history. - France
  

• Languedoc France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Languedoc is more an idea than a geographical entity. - France
  

• Dordogne Limousin and Lot France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The land covered in this section forms a rough oval bordered to the east by the uplands of the Massif Central and to the west by the Atlantic plains. - France
  

• Pyrenees France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Basque-speaking, wet and green in the west; craggy, snowy, Gascon-influenced in the middle; dry, Mediterranean and Catalan-speaking in the east - the Pyrenees are physically beautiful, culturally varied and considerably less developed than the Alps. - France