Have you ever imagined to enjoy the world’s largest and most popular museum, with no other tourist in sight? Of course we’re talking about Louvre in Paris which attracts 10.2 million people per year. Now you can avoid all that curious crowd and have the entire museum to yourself. You just need $34,000.
For that amount up to four people can experience the Louvre in this unparalleled fashion. The 90-minute tour is being offered by Paris-based luxury travel company Family Twist, which founder, Magali Dechelette, started offering the private Louvre tour three years ago after a client from Shanghai told her that his ultimate fantasy was to be alone at the Louvre.
Now, she is able to offer the service to other wealthy clients looking for the same level of access.
Tours begin in the evening, with guests being picked up at 6:30 pm from their hotels (the museum closes at 6:00 pm four days a week) and driven by a Tesla to the drop-off point at I.M. Pei’s iconic glass pyramid. The tour starts at the medieval section, in what was formerly the building’s dungeon during the 12th century. The visitors are then greeted by an art historian who hands them an envelope. Almost like a real-life treasure hunt, cards are enclosed inside with bits of the museum’s masterpieces (Mona Lisa’s eye or the cat in Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana) so that guests can try to match them to the antiquities they see along the tour.
At just an hour and a half long, the tour cannot possibly include the museum’s 38,000 pieces of exhibited art, so the tour hits museum highlights such as those mentioned above, as well as the Venus di Milo and Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. (Though we are pretty sure if you wanted to tailor it to your own interests, Dechelette would be able to oblige . . . presumably for an extra fee.)
The tour ends, of course, with the Mona Lisa. However, there are a few surprises along the tour, like a ballerina dancing on the staircase leading up the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
The evening ends on the Pont des Arts, where guests board a private riverboat (Paris’s Bateaux Mouche river cruises are a famous tourist excursion, and we assume this is an upgraded boat) with Champagne, cheese, and caviar, to take in Paris by night along the Seine.
