'Adventures in the Louvre' will teach you how to fall in love with the famous museum
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I've been to the Louvre in Paris once, and this is a true story. By the time I got to the Mona Lisa, the alarms started going off and the entire building was evacuated. Which is to say, I don't...

think I got the full Louvre experience? Thankfully, Elaine Sciolino is on the pod today talking about her book, Adventures in the Louvre, How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum. It's a guidebook of sorts on how to tackle the Louvre, but even if you don't have any plans to visit Paris anytime soon, her general advice works for just about any museum. For instance, she tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, you have to give yourself the freedom to get lost. That's coming up.

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Learn more at Betterment.com. Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed. A trip to the Louvre is the museum version of a blood sport. You need to be ready for the fight.

So writes Elaine Scilino in her new book about the Louvre. Scilino is a former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, and the book is part journalism, part memoir, part art history. It is titled Adventures in the Louvre, How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum.

Elaine Chileno is on the line from Paris. Bonjour, bienvenue. Oh, what a great accent you've got. Gosh, it's better than... I still sound like an American here. Well, you're very, very welcome on all things considered. I...

I have to start. You have all kinds of tips for visiting the Louvre, and I want to dive in there because you instruct us we should arrive straight from a cafe, ideally having fortified yourself with a traditional correctly toasted croque monsieur, which sounds like great advice for pretty much everything in life. Forget just visiting the Louvre. Well, absolutely. I have one mantra, which I tell everybody, never go to the Louvre on an empty stomach or with a full bladder.

Because everybody sort of thinks, oh, I think I'll just walk from O'Meara to the Louvre today. And then I'll just go to the toilet when I get in and grab something to eat. No, this doesn't happen. Bad idea. Be prepared before. Okay, but really a blood sport and be ready for the fight? That sounds dramatic.

The Louvre is a tough place. It's not supposed to be fun. It's kind of like running a half marathon for the first time. You don't know what you're going to face and you just have to be ready for anything. This is the biggest and most visited museum in the world. And you've got to accept that it's too crowded and too confusing.

400 rooms. 400 rooms. It's overwhelming. Except one of the things that jumped out at me early in your book is you write, a lot of visitors can feel underwhelmed. That feels counterintuitive.

You can feel underwhelmed because of your expectations. You come to the Louvre, you wait forever to get in, you finally get in, and there are just too many people in the Camembert, which is where you have to maneuver to get up to one of the wings, and you're excited, you're there perhaps for the first time, and you have to go see the Mona Lisa. You finally get to her, and she's small.

And you can't get close to her. And you say, I spent all that time and money for this. And that's what I mean by underwhelmed is that she doesn't...

naturally carry you away and you don't have some epiphany and great feeling about life. You think, oh my gosh, is that all there is? And where is the bathroom, by the way? And where's the bathroom? And yeah, it's kind of like a disappointing lover for the first time. You know, you sort of think, oh God, okay, is this what it's going to be like?

Well, back up and give us a little bit of the history, because the Louvre, as you detail, it wasn't built as a place to show great art to the people. It was a fortress. It was an arsenal. It was a prison. I mean, briefly, how did it come to be a museum? Well, first of all, no one can even give you a good answer about why it's called the Louvre and how did it get that name? I mean, for centuries before anything was built on that plot of land, that land was called the Louvre.

there are all sorts of theories about the word. It comes from the French word perhaps for she-wolf, so maybe the site was inhabited by wolves, or there's other theories. Maybe it was named after a fortified castle or a leper colony or an ancient signal tower or a plantation of oak trees. No one can tell you the answer, so right from the beginning, you don't know what you're getting into.

And as you said, it wasn't built as a museum. I mean, some people complain about the Met in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum. They say it's big and confusing and cold, but at least it was built as a place to show great art. I mean, the Louvre began in the Middle Ages at the end of the 12th century, and it was built as a fortress to protect Paris. And then it was turned into a palace for the kings. Wow.

And basically, they didn't really like it as a palace, so that eventually it was turned into a museum at the French Revolution. Circle back to the Mona Lisa, because you write about how the museum staff has a love-hate relationship with Mona Lisa. And I want to know why. The Mona Lisa is both a blessing and a curse.

About 80% of first-time visitors come primarily to see the Mona Lisa. There's no other museum in the world that is so identified with one work of art. But who the heck can explain the cult of the Mona Lisa? She's not the Virgin Mary. She's not even a saint. But she is the best-known artwork in the entire world. The director of paintings doesn't really like the Mona Lisa. And I asked him one day, I said, so...

are there other paintings, portraits that are more beautiful than the Mona Lisa? And he said, yeah, there really are. And I said, oh, you take me to find a few of them? And so one day we went looking for paintings that he considers even more extraordinary than the Mona Lisa. One of my favorite stories that you tell in this book is about how you met the curator, I guess it's the curator in charge of 16th century Italian painting. And his job, among his jobs, is to open the Mona Lisa's fan mail?

Oh, yeah. Did you know that there are hundreds of letters that have been written to the Mona Lisa over the years and letters written about and to the Mona Lisa? I mean, some people actually think she's alive and they write to her, you know, Dear Mona, could you please help me with my love life? I need your help, blah, blah, blah. I mean, other letters are written to the head of the museum saying,

She looks yellow not because she has varnish, but because she has jaundice. But they treat her in many of these letters as a live person who actually exists. Just circle us back to where we began and the vastness of the Louvre and how easy it is to get lost and how hard it is to find a snack.

The value of getting lost, of going in with no agenda whatsoever and just seeing what strikes your eye on any given day? This is really important to tell your listeners, and it's important for any museum. You have to find out what kind of a museum goer you are, and sometimes you're a first-timer, and that's the hardest because you're like a warrior and you have to wear good shoes and be ready to do battle.

But you can also be what I call a flaneur or a wanderer. And this is the most liberating way to see the Louvre or just about any museum, where you give yourself the freedom to get lost. And you just say to yourself, I

I'm just going to wander around and find something new to discover. And you will find something beautiful. And that is in this era that we're in, of so much turmoil, of so much uncertainty, of so much up and down, of so much being assaulted by the news, to be able to go into a museum and to make contact even with one work of art and feel the beauty of that work of art and the genius of the artist, it carries you away.

Elaine Cialino, speaking with us from Paris about her new book, Adventures in the Louvre. Thank you. Well, thank you. And just a reminder that signing up for Book of the Day Plus is a great way to support NPR's book coverage and public media. And you'll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please, go find out more at plus.npr.org slash bookoftheday. ♪

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