Paris - The Louvre

Our first stop on Thursday morning was the Louvre. We enjoyed touring the museum. However, Jason and I felt a lot like we did when we visited the Smithsonian. We would love to go back one day (without the girls) and spend a week. The girls just are not at the point yet of appreciating such museums.

Again, for those of you who like history, here are a few facts I pulled off the internet. If you're not into history, just scroll on down to the bottom and enjoy the slideshow.

The Louvre in Paris, France, is the most visited and one of the oldest, largest, and most famous art galleries and museums in the world.

It has a long history of artistic and historic conservation, inaugurated in the Capetian dynasty and continuing to this day. The building was previously a royal palace and holds some of the world's most famous works of art, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Madonna of the Rocks, Jacques Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Alexandros of Antioch's Venus de Milo.

With 8.3 million visitors in 2006, the Louvre is the most visited art museum in the world.

After the French Revolution, the royal Louvre collection became the "Muséum central des Arts" and opened as such in 1793. From 1794 onwards, France's victorious revolutionary armies brought back increasing numbers of artworks from across Europe, aiming to establish it as a major European museum. Particularly significant additions to the collection were the masterpieces from Italy which arrived in Paris in July 1798 with much pomp and ceremony.

The sheer number of these statues forced the museum's curators into reorganising the displays. The building was redecorated and inaugurated in 1800, and renamed the "Musée Napoléon" in 1803. It continued to grow through purchases and became a universal museum of art. Most of the art Napoleon directed his commissioners to take was sculpture rather than old-master paintings. For a short period, this allowed north Europeans to see the finest of classical sculpture without organising an expensive Grand Tour to Italy itself.

The collections shrank, however, when almost all wartime acquisitions had to be returned after Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

Originally, the Louvre was the first royal "Castle of the Louvre" and was founded in what was then the western edge of Paris by Philip Augustus in 1190. It was a fortified royal palace built to defend Paris on its west against attacks. The first building in the existing Louvre was begun in 1535, after demolition of the old Castle.