Louvre Museum Paris – navigating Denon, Sully and Richelieu

The Louvre is the world’s largest art museum, and that scale is exactly what trips people up. Walk in without a plan and you’ll spend half your visit lost in corridors, missing rooms you actually wanted to see while getting stuck in a crowd around one you didn’t. The museum is split into three wings – Denon, Sully and Richelieu – and once that layout clicks, the whole place becomes navigable rather than overwhelming.

Here’s what’s actually in each wing, where to find the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and the other pieces everyone’s looking for, what a ticket costs in 2026, and how to avoid burning half a day standing in line.

So what actually is this place?

The Louvre opened to the public on August 10, 1793, inside the former royal Palais du Louvre in central Paris – a building that had already been serving as a fortress and then a palace for centuries before it became a museum. Today the collection holds somewhere between 480,000 and 500,000 items, of which roughly 35,000 are actually on display across more than 60,000 square meters of exhibition space. Nobody sees all of it in one visit, and nobody’s meant to.

• 🏛️ Three wings – Denon, Sully and Richelieu – wrapped around the central Cour Napoléon and its glass pyramid
• 🖼️ Roughly 35,000 works on permanent display, out of a total collection nearing half a million items
• 📅 Opened in 1793, making it one of the oldest public museums in the world
• 🕘 Closed Tuesdays, with extended evening hours on Wednesdays and Fridays
• 🎟️ Dual pricing since January 2026 – €22 for EEA visitors, €32 for everyone else
• 👁️ Widely considered the world’s most-visited museum, at around 9 million visitors a year

Tickets and hours – what changed in 2026

As of January 14, 2026, the Louvre introduced dual pricing for the first time in its history – €22 for residents and citizens of the European Economic Area, and €32 for everyone outside it, including US, UK and most other non-European visitors. That’s a real jump from the old flat €22 rate, so budget accordingly if you’re traveling from outside the EEA. Admission is free for anyone under 18 and for EEA residents under 26, and free for everyone on the first Friday of the month after 6pm (except July and August) and on July 14th.

• Opening hours: Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday 9:00 AM-6:00 PM; Wednesday and Friday 9:00 AM-9:00 PM; closed Tuesdays
• Last entry is one hour before closing, with rooms cleared 30 minutes before
• Time-slot booking is strongly recommended even for free-admission visitors – walk-up tickets are only sold on-site when attendance is low, and that’s rarely the case
• A standard ticket also covers same-day or next-day entry to the Musée National Eugène-Delacroix nearby

Getting in – which entrance to use

The main glass Pyramid entrance in the Cour Napoléon is the iconic photo spot, but it’s also where the longest queues form, especially in summer. The Carrousel du Louvre entrance at 99 Rue de Rivoli connects through the underground shopping mall directly to the ticket hall, and it’s consistently the faster way in – the same underground lobby the museum’s own layout routes visitors through before splitting off toward Denon, Sully or Richelieu.

Denon Wing – the highlights everyone comes for

Denon is the wing most first-time visitors spend the bulk of their time in, and it’s where nearly every instantly recognizable Louvre masterpiece lives.

🖼️ Mona Lisa – 1st Floor, Room 711

Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait is the single most visited object in the museum, held behind glass in Room 711 and almost always surrounded by a crowd. It’s genuinely smaller in person than most people expect – worth turning around once you’ve seen it, because directly across the room hangs The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese, the largest painting in the entire Louvre, which most visitors walk straight past.

🇫🇷 Liberty Leading the People & The Coronation of Napoleon I – 1st Floor, Rooms 700 and 702

Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and Jacques-Louis David’s monumental Coronation of Napoleon I sit nearby, two of the defining works of French Romantic and Neoclassical painting, both large enough to genuinely stop foot traffic in their rooms.

🏛️ Winged Victory of Samothrace – Daru Staircase

Perched at the top of the Daru Staircase, this headless, armless marble figure is one of the most dramatic sightlines in the entire museum – positioned deliberately so it’s the first thing visible as you climb toward the first floor.

💫 Apollo Gallery – Room 705

The Galerie d’Apollon houses the French Crown Jewels alongside an extraordinarily ornate ceiling and gilded interior – one of the most opulent rooms in the palace, worth visiting for the room itself as much as what’s displayed inside it.

🎨 Italian and British/American Paintings

Denon’s first floor also holds the museum’s Italian painting galleries and a smaller British and American painting collection, plus a room dedicated to Gustave Courbet’s The Clubfoot, a lesser-known but genuinely arresting realist portrait.

🌍 The Gallery of Five Continents & Michelangelo’s Dying Slave – Ground Floor

A newer addition to the museum, this ground-floor gallery reframes select works within a global context. Nearby, Michelangelo’s Dying Slave stands among the sculpture collection – one of only a handful of Michelangelo works outside Italy.

⚰️ Saint Mary Magdalene and more – Lower Ground Floor

The lower level rounds out Denon’s sculpture holdings, a quieter and less crowded stretch of the wing worth the extra flight of stairs.

Sully Wing – Venus de Milo and the ancient world

Sully wraps around the museum’s historic core and holds some of the oldest and most significant pieces in the entire collection.

🗿 Venus de Milo & more – Ground Floor

The armless marble Venus de Milo is Sully’s answer to the Mona Lisa in terms of drawing power – a Hellenistic-era Greek sculpture whose missing arms have only added to its mystique over the centuries.

🏰 Medieval Louvre Gallery – Underground

Beneath the modern museum, the excavated foundations of the original 12th-century Louvre fortress are on display – moat, drawbridge base and keep foundations included. It’s one of the more surprising stops in the building, a physical reminder that the Louvre was a defensive structure centuries before it held a single painting.

𓁧 Egyptian Antiquities – Ground and 1st Floor

One of the largest Egyptian collections outside Cairo, spanning both floors of Sully. This section is genuinely underrated relative to the paintings – many repeat visitors rank it as their favorite part of the whole museum. Highlights include The Seated Scribe, one of the best-preserved pieces of Old Kingdom Egyptian sculpture anywhere, and the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, an Etruscan terracotta piece depicting a reclining couple with striking warmth for a funerary object.

🎨 French Paintings – 2nd Floor

Sully’s second floor houses the bulk of the Louvre’s French painting collection, a quieter and less crowded counterpart to Denon’s Italian masterworks one floor system over.

🏺 Palace of Darius I – Ground Floor

Sully also connects into the Near Eastern Antiquities collection, including remnants of the Palace of Darius I from ancient Persia – a reminder of just how far back and how far afield the Louvre’s holdings actually reach.

Richelieu Wing – where fewer crowds go deeper

Richelieu tends to see roughly a third of the foot traffic of Denon, for twice the breathing room – it’s where more experienced Louvre visitors tend to head once they’ve covered the headline pieces.

🧵 The Lacemaker & more – 2nd Floor

Johannes Vermeer’s tiny, precise The Lacemaker anchors Richelieu’s Northern European painting collection – a section worth the detour for anyone drawn to Dutch Golden Age painters like Vermeer and Rembrandt.

🛋️ European Decorative Arts – 1st Floor

A sprawling collection of furniture, tapestries and decorative objects spanning centuries of European craftsmanship, presented across a genuinely impressive run of period rooms.

👑 Napoleon III Apartments – 1st Floor

Among the most over-the-top rooms in the entire museum – preserved 19th-century state apartments dripping in gold leaf, velvet and crystal chandeliers, built to entertain foreign dignitaries during the Second French Empire. It doesn’t feel like a museum gallery at all; it feels like walking directly into the 1860s.

🗿 French Sculpture – Ground and 1st Floor

Richelieu’s sculpture galleries run across two floors and two glass-roofed courtyards, giving large-scale French sculpture the kind of natural light and open space that’s harder to find in Denon’s more traditional gallery rooms.

𓂀 Statue of Ebih-Il, the Lamassu and the Code of Hammurabi – Ground Floor

Richelieu’s ground floor holds some of the single most important objects in the whole museum for ancient history – the Statue of Ebih-Il, a Sumerian votive figure; a colossal Human-Headed Winged Bull (Lamassu) from the palace of Sargon II; and the Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world, inscribed on a basalt stele nearly 4,000 years ago.

Practical stuff – Wi-Fi, food and the shop

Free Wi-Fi is available throughout the museum, useful for pulling up the Louvre’s own map app while navigating between wings. For food, the museum runs a mix of restaurants and cafés at various points across the building – worth planning around rather than trying to push through on an empty stomach given how much walking a full visit involves. The official museum shop, split into a boutique and library section, sits near the main entrance and carries everything from exhibition catalogues to higher-end reproductions and gifts. The underground Carrousel du Louvre mall, accessible via the alternative entrance, adds a full shopping concourse if you want to extend the visit beyond the museum itself.

Best time to visit

The Mona Lisa’s room is busiest between 11am and 2pm – visiting right at opening or after 4pm gives a noticeably cleaner view. Wednesday and Friday evening hours, running until 9pm, tend to be quieter than daytime slots and are worth prioritizing if your schedule allows. Summer, particularly around a timed pyramid entry, can still mean a 45-90 minute wait even with a booking – the Carrousel entrance is the better call during peak season. For a full first-time visit covering the highlights across all three wings, budget at least half a day; a focused visit hitting just the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo and Winged Victory can be done in under two hours.

Frequently asked questions

📹 Video by ST Travel