Musée du Louvre

The Louvre began as a fortress. Philip II raised it on the right bank of the Seine around 1190 to guard medieval Paris, and over the following centuries French kings rebuilt it into a royal palace, until Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles in 1682 and left the half-finished halls to the royal collection and the artists lodged inside.

The Revolution turned it into a public museum. On 10 August 1793 the Muséum central des arts opened its doors, showing the confiscated art of the crown and the church to any citizen who wished to walk in. Napoleon filled it with the spoils of his campaigns and briefly renamed it after himself. Much was returned after Waterloo, but the idea held, a national collection arranged for study and free to the public.

Today the Louvre holds more than 35,000 works, from the Venus de Milo to Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. The crowds, though, press toward one small portrait. In August 1911 it vanished: Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked in the museum, lifted Leonardo's Mona Lisa off the wall and carried it out under his coat. For two years the frame hung empty while visitors came to stare at the gap, and the painting returned only in 1913, after Peruggia tried to sell it to a dealer in Florence. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid, set in the courtyard in 1989, now marks the entrance.