Visit the palace of French kings to admire some of the world's finest art. The Louvre holds many of Western Civilization's most famous masterpieces, including the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, and is one of the top things to do in Paris. A large number of the museum's paintings were owned by the various kings who lived in the Louvre when it was a royal residence, other pieces were acquired through France's treaties with the Vatican and the Venetian Republic, and the collection was further enriched by the spoils of Napoléon I.

I must start to say that The Louvre is certainly a must see and do. This is one huge museum. The museum packs 30,000 artworks into a 60,000-square-meter exhibition space in three sections: the Denon, Richelieu, and Sully wings. Each wing has more than 70 rooms displaying paintings and objects of art, plus there are enormous halls filled with sculptures,I don't know how much time and is needed to take a complete tour. The most important works here are the Mona Lisa and Venus di Milo.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

Many visitors come to the Louvre just to see this one painting. The Mona Lisa is the museum's most famous work of art.The painting presents a woman in half-body portrait, which has as a backdrop a distant landscape. Yet this simple description of a seemingly standard composition gives little sense of Leonardo’s achievement but in my own experience when I saw the Mona Lisa for the first time, there were a lot of people so my assumption was that it would be overrated, so I almost didn't even stop. But a space opened in the crowd and I was standing in front of this beautiful paint and I directly fell in love. The painting is luminous, nothing like the thousands of reproductions everywhere.

Venus di Milo

This graceful statue of a goddess has intrigued and fascinated since its discovery on the island of Melos in 1820. Is it Aphrodite, who was often portrayed half-naked, or the sea goddess Amphitrite, who was venerated on Milo? The statue reflects sculptural research during the late Hellenistic Period: classical in essence, with innovatory features such as the spiral composition, the positioning in space, and the fall of the drapery over the hips. My experience seeing this sculpture didn't really changed my life but, I did enjoy this firsthand peek back into the century before Christ. Plus, seeing something for yourself is always preferable to reading about it in a book.