The Louvre is the world's largest art museum, and the Mona Lisa inside is... disappointingly small. At just 30 inches by 21 inches, it's about the size of a movie poster. And it's behind bulletproof glass, behind a rope, behind a crowd of 30,000 daily visitors.
The painting is famous partly because it was stolen in 1911. A Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia hid in a closet overnight, then walked out with the painting under his coat. It was missing for two years. The theft made the Mona Lisa a global celebrity.
The museum itself is so vast that if you spent just 30 seconds looking at each of its 380,000 objects, it would take you about 100 days to see everything. The building used to be a royal palace, which explains why it takes an hour just to find the bathroom.
The glass pyramid in the courtyard was controversial when it was built in 1989. Parisians hated it almost as much as they hated the Eiffel Tower. Now it's beloved. Paris really needs to stop pre-judging its architectur
e.
Oh, and the Louvre was briefly Napoleon's house. He renamed it "Musée Napoleon" and filled it with art he "acquired" (stole) from his conquests. Classy guy.
