About Louvre Museum
The least obvious way to start the Louvre is from underneath. In the basement you can still see the remains of the fortress King Philip II had built in the late 12th century, long before the building became a palace and, in 1793, a museum. Starting there gives the rest some scale: you are walking through more than eight centuries of construction and remodeling.
Upstairs, about 35,000 works are on display, and the Mona Lisa is just one of them, almost always surrounded by a small forest of raised phones. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid, opened in 1989, became the front door. Since January 2026, visitors from outside the European Economic Area pay a higher fare.
