Give one museum your entire day
By four in the afternoon most of the crowd has already gone, off to catch a train or an early dinner, and you have the Denon wing nearly to yourself. The museum holds around 35,000 works across roughly 780,000 square feet — more building than any single day can cover — yet most visitors spend under two hours inside, funnelled toward the Mona Lisa and back out. Stay past lunch, past the postcard queue, into the quiet rooms of Mesopotamian tablets and Egyptian sarcophagi. That's where you find a guard asleep on a folding chair beside a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform tablet nobody else has stopped to read.
Practical
- Cost
- $20–30 for entry ticket
- Best time
- Spring or autumn, avoiding summer crowds and school holidays
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time it takes
- Six to eight hours, with a break outside
- What people get wrong
- People try to see everything in the first two hours and burn out before lunch; better to pick two or three wings and let the rest go. Many also don't realise their ticket allows re-entry, so they skip the outdoor break they actually need.
- With
- Alone