A very deep dive into the Louvre museum

Best-selling author Elaine Sciolino demystifies the world-famous museum in her upcoming book "Adventures in the Louvre".

Hello folks,

This week I’m heading back to the Louvre. Well, figuratively-speaking, via a conversation with author Elaine Sciolino. In today’s podcast, we chat about her upcoming book Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum. The book pulls back the curtain on a building many think they know, but which still contains endless secrets and untold stories.

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Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find the episode on iTunes or Spotify or via my website here.

And if you think you recognise Elaine’s name and voice, perhaps you heard her on the pod before! Elaine, the former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, has featured The Earful Tower in the past discussing her books about the Seine River and the Rue des Martyrs. In fact, she was the second-ever guest on the show, back in 2017.

Elaine Sciolino on the Louvre

Elaine used her extensive experience as a reporter to influence how she wrote this book. She decided the best approach was to explain the Louvre museum “through the prism of someone who’s not an art historian and who’s not a tour guide. I decided to just report the Louvre and talk to everybody that I possibly could.”

And, my goodness, the surprises Elaine uncovered will knock your socks off: spending the day with the museum’s permanent on-site fire fighters, a secret World War Two bunker, and a very well-hidden chunk of my beloved Philippe Auguste wall.

For Louvre novices who are in danger of having an exhausting and frustrating experience trying to see and do everything, Elaine offers this advice “Find your Louvre identity, find what kind of a visitor you are… And once you decide that it makes it a lot easier, because you forgive yourself for not being perfect…You go each time with a different identity, like you go each time and discover a different work of art.”

Elaine confesses that she wasn’t always the biggest fan of the museum, “the Louvre is a challenge, it’s too big…it’s too crowded, it’s an impossible museum. You have to find your way in. So that’s what I tried to do.” Having visited the building hundreds of times in the course of writing the book, I wondered if Elaine was all Louvre-d out or did she intend to go back? “Oh no, I have to go back. I have to keep going back.”

Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum is released on 1 April 2025. You can pre-order it here.

As a fun extra at the end of the episode, Bertrand d’Aleman tells us about a current exhibition at the museum: Louvre Couture. This is an exploration of how the vast breadth of decorative art contained within the walls of the museum has informed the world of high fashion. The Louvre Couture exhibition runs from 24 January - 21 July. Book your tickets here. And See find more of what My Private Paris offers here.

Artwork mentioned in this episode: Mona Lisa (also known as La Joconde) by Leonardo da Vinci; Man with a glove by Titian, Portrait of a Man (also known as La Condottiere) by Antonello da Messina; The death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David.

See you at the Louvre sometime, perhaps.

Oliver

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Photos: Oliver Gee, Augusta Sagnelli, and My Private Paris. Additional reporting by Hannah Coyle.