Adventures in the Louvre
How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
One of the Economist's Best Books of the Year
One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Travel Books of 2025
An American Bookseller Association’s Indie Travel Literature Bestseller
One of Library Journal's Best Books of the Year
Author featured in Discovery Channel's documentary Louvre Heist: Minute by Minute
A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation.
The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress.
Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum’s lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure.
Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the museum’s front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times contributing writer Sciolino (The Only Street in Paris) takes readers on an affectionate and expressive tour through the labyrinthine halls of the "best-known and yet least understood museum in the world." Combining history, interviews, and firsthand experience, she discusses famous artworks (including the 2,200-year-old Greek sculpture of Nike); explores how the Mona Lisa—which became a "global superstar" after being stolen in 1911— "enslaves and empowers" the museum with its complex logistical and financial hurdles and pull on first-time visitors, 80% of whom visit primarily to see the painting; and delves into the sometimes-exclusionary nature of art history exemplified in clashes between the museum and contemporary culture (in 2018 the museum staged Beyoncé and Jay-Z's music video for "Apeshit"—viewed by some as a showy display of wealth and by others as an empowering attempt to open the "historically white space" to a broader audience). Undergirding the author's conversations with curators, art historians, and museum guards is her own appealingly intimate—if occasionally gushing—narrative of falling in love with the museum and in the process discovering the "sensual dialogue emerges when human beings discover the wonder in works of art." The result is a charmingly effusive love letter sure to delight art history buffs. Photos.
