In Paris people go to the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa from a distance, in the middle of two hundred raised phones.
It is a ritual, and there is no point pretending otherwise: the painting is behind glass, several metres away, in a room people enter, photograph and leave without turning round. Anyone who has been knows it: in Paris the Mona Lisa is visited, not looked at.
This article proposes the opposite. There is one criterion behind the selection, and I will state it now because it is the real value of this list: I have chosen nine works you can genuinely look at, that is, with the time, the space and the light needed to see them. Some are in famous museums, some are free, one is just outside Paris and one is a garden.
And since the most useful thing is often where to look rather than where to rush, I will start with the most dazzling of all, which is also the only one worth booking a timed slot for.
1 – The stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle
If you have to choose one single thing to see in Paris, choose this.
The Sainte-Chapelle was built from 1241 at the wish of Louis IX, with one purpose: to hold the relics of the Passion, above all the crown of thorns. It is not a church: it is a reliquary the size of a building, and that is why the walls practically do not exist.
In the upper chapel the windows are fifteen metres high and tell eleven hundred scenes: the light does not come in through the windows, it is the windows. On sunny days the stone disappears and you are left inside a colour that resembles no other visual experience in Europe.
And here is the fact nobody mentions and that makes it all more interesting: Louis IX paid more than three times as much for the relics as it cost to build the chapel. The crown of thorns was bought in 1239 from Baldwin II, Latin emperor of Constantinople, who, short of cash, had pawned it to Venetian bankers. The king paid roughly 135,000 livres tournois, almost half the kingdom’s annual budget. Building the container was, by comparison, the small expense.
Inside the Sainte-Chapelle today there is no relic left: the silver reliquary was melted down during the Revolution, and in 1806 the crown passed to the Treasury of Notre-Dame. From there it was saved from the flames in 2019, and after the cathedral reopened it returned in December 2024.
The full story, with advice on the right hour for the light, is in the article on the Sainte-Chapelle.
2 – The Mona Lisa, and what to look at instead in the same room
Let’s go to the Louvre and face the problem.
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa measures 77 by 53 centimetres. It is a small painting, behind bulletproof glass, with a crowd in front of it and a one-way route pushing you along. I am not telling you not to see it: I am telling you that five minutes are enough and that the rest of your time is better spent.
And here is the most useful thing in this article. In the same room as the Mona Lisa, on the opposite wall, hangs the largest painting in the Louvre: the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese, of 1563, 666 by 990 centimetres. Nearly seventy square metres of canvas, a hundred and thirty figures, a Venetian feast dressed up as a gospel episode. It is right there, behind everybody, and most visitors do not turn round.
Try it: go into the room, look at the Mona Lisa for as long as you like, then turn 180 degrees. The ratio between the two surfaces is roughly one to a hundred and sixty.
And the story of how it got there is a piece of European history. The painting was in the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. In 1797 Napoleon requisitioned Venetian cultural property; on 11 September of that year the canvas was taken down from the wall, cut into seven pieces so it could be transported, and reassembled in Paris. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815 France did not return it, arguing that it was too fragile to travel. It is the one great Venetian masterpiece that never went home, and it hangs opposite the most photographed painting in the world.
Advice on entrances, hours and how to organise the visit is in the article on how to skip the line at the Louvre.
3 – The Petit Palais, the free museum nobody mentions
On Avenue Winston Churchill, two hundred metres from the Champs-Élysées, there is a fine arts museum with a collection running from antiquity to 1900, in a building of 1900 with a double-ramped staircase and a glass dome. Entry to the permanent collections is free.
The Petit Palais is the fine arts museum of the City of Paris, and the reason it is on this list is precise: it is the place where you can stand alone in front of a painting, which in Paris normally costs a lot of queuing and a lot of money. It has no emblematic masterpiece to put on a cover, and that is why the booking sites do not sell it.
One fact worth knowing: the municipal museums of Paris are free for everyone, with no limits of age or nationality, when they are not hosting temporary exhibitions. There are fourteen of them, and the exceptions are the Catacombs and the Archaeological Crypt of the Île de la Cité. Translated: Paris has an entire free museum circuit that almost no guidebook highlights.
The account of the collection is in the article on the Petit Palais.
4 – Notre-Dame after the fire
This is the section with the most recent data, and the one that changes fastest.
Notre-Dame has reopened, and the information that matters is that entry to the cathedral is free: you do not need to buy any ticket. There is an optional online booking system at resa.notredamedeparis.fr, with free time slots opening two or three days before the visit, and each booking covers a maximum of six people. It is not compulsory, but at peak times it changes the wait.
The hours: Monday to Friday 7.45 am to 7 pm, with Thursday extended to 10 pm; Saturday and Sunday 8.15 am to 7.30 pm.
There are two paid parts, and they need distinguishing:
- the towers, which reopened in September 2025, with a paid climb and a timed slot to book;
- the Treasury, entered from inside the cathedral through the south ambulatory, in the sacristy spaces: 12 euros full and 6 euros reduced for under 12s and students. This is where the crown of thorns returned in December 2024, and it is shown to the faithful on Fridays.
What to look at, with the eye of art rather than of the news: the clean stone. The restoration removed centuries of black, and the interior today is a pale colour nobody alive had ever seen. It is a historically unrepeatable experience, and anyone walking in expecting the dark cathedral of the photographs comes out disoriented.
The account of the fire and the rebuilding is in the article on Notre-Dame de Paris.
5 – Montmartre, where the works were born and no longer are
Montmartre is on this list for a counter-intuitive reason: it is the one place in Paris where the works are not, and precisely for that reason it is indispensable.
Here, between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, lived and worked Picasso, Modigliani, Utrillo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Renoir, Suzanne Valadon. The pictures they painted are at the Musée d’Orsay, at the Orangerie, at MoMA, in Moscow. What remains here are the streets in which they painted them, and that is a thing you look at with different eyes.
The reading I would offer is one of topography: modern painting is born on a hill, in an area that was then outside the walls of Paris, and therefore with cheap rent and untaxed wine. That is not a picturesque detail, it is the cause. Modernity in painting is born where living was cheap.
Which also explains the ending: when Montmartre became famous and expensive, the painters moved to Montparnasse. The neighbourhood you see today, with the portrait artists in the square, is the consequence of that success.
The itinerary with the stops that are still worth it is in the article on what to see in Montmartre.
6 – The tombs of Père-Lachaise as sculpture
Père-Lachaise is the most visited cemetery in the world, and it is on this list not for the names: it is here because it is an open-air, free museum of funerary sculpture.
Walking through it you cross two centuries of styles: neoclassicism, the Gothic revival, late nineteenth-century eclecticism, art deco. And there are monuments that are works of art in their own right, not decorations.
The case I would suggest looking for is the tomb of Oscar Wilde, in division 89: a block of stone with a winged figure, and a story that starts badly, because Wilde was not buried here straight away. His last friend took years to find the money for the plot, and until then his body remained in the cemetery of Bagneux.
The practical advice: take a map at the entrance, because Père-Lachaise is enormous and uphill, and the divisions do not follow an intuitive logic. And bring walking shoes: the surface is cobbled and uneven.
The tombs not to miss, from Géricault to Jim Morrison, are in the article on the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
7 – The Japanese garden of Albert-Kahn
Now something that is neither a painting nor a sculpture, and that belongs on this list by right: a garden designed as a work of art.
Albert Kahn was a banker who at the beginning of the twentieth century funded a mad and beautiful project, the Archives de la Planète: sending photographers all over the world to document human cultures in colour, using the autochrome process. Around his house he had a series of gardens built that are the vegetal version of the same idea: a Japanese garden, an English one, a conifer forest, a French garden.
The Japanese garden is the part you will remember, and the reading is this: it is not exoticism. It is a garden built by a man who had sent someone to photograph Japan and wanted to understand it, not quote it. The care over the composition, the sheets of water and the fixed routes is that of a project, not of a decorating scheme.
An honest geographical note: it is not in Paris, it is in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside, and you get there by metro. Which makes it half a day, not an hour.
The full account is in the article on the Japanese garden in Paris.
8 – The Bagatelle rose garden
In the Bois de Boulogne, inside the Parc de Bagatelle, there is a rose garden that is also a piece of botanical history: since 1907 it has hosted the oldest international competition for new roses in the world.
The reason it belongs on a list of artworks is that a competition rose garden is designed as a collection: the varieties are laid out for comparison, labelled, grown in identical conditions so that the jury can judge them. It is a museum in which the works are replaced every year and assessed by experts, exactly as at a biennale.
The constraint to know about: it is the only entry on this list with a season. The moment is June, with a second flowering in September. Outside those windows you will see a fine park and nothing else, so do not put it in a January itinerary.
The account is in the article on the Bagatelle rose garden.
9 – Saint-Denis, the necropolis of the kings
I will finish with the most underrated of all, and the most important from the point of view of art history.
The basilica of Saint-Denis is the first great Gothic work in France: it is here, under Abbot Suger, that the elements which would become the Gothic are first brought together, that is, the great windowed walls, the vertical thrust and a completely new use of light. Every cathedral you admire in Europe descends from this building site.
And it is the necropolis of the kings of France: inside there are dozens of royal tombs and funerary monuments, a sequence of sculpture spanning centuries that reads like a gallery of portraits in stone.
Why does nobody go? Because it is outside the centre, in a suburb to the north, reachable by metro, and because it has no spire you recognise from the photographs. It is the right place if you have already seen Paris once and want to understand where all the rest comes from.
The account, with Abbot Suger and the royal tombs, is in the article on the basilica of Saint-Denis.
Practical information
Details verified on 30 July 2026 on the official sites of the Louvre, of Notre-Dame and of the administrations of the museums named. Prices and hours change, and in Paris they change often: check again before you travel.
The Louvre, with the 2026 change. The ticket costs 22 euros for residents of the European Economic Area and 32 euros for non-EEA visitors: it is a two-tier fare, and it is the most important change of recent years. Free for under 18s and for EEA residents under 26. The museum is closed on Tuesday; it opens 9 am to 6 pm on Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 9 am to 9 pm on Wednesday and Friday, with last entry an hour before.
⚠️ A clarification against a widespread error: the official site says that booking a time slot is recommended, including for free-admission visitors, not compulsory. Many guides online write that it is compulsory: it is not. That said, booking is the sensible thing to do, and for the morning slots it is all but indispensable.
The real free things in Paris, which are the genuine saving:
- the Petit Palais and the other municipal museums (fourteen in all) are free for everyone for their permanent collections, when there are no temporary exhibitions. The Catacombs and the Archaeological Crypt are outside the scheme;
- the Louvre is free on the first Friday of the month from 6 pm to 9.45 pm, excluding July and August;
- Notre-Dame is always free, towers and Treasury excepted;
- Père-Lachaise is free;
- the gardens of Bagatelle and the outer part of Albert-Kahn charge modest fees, a long way from museum prices.
The Paris Museum Pass: is it worth it? It comes in three lengths, 2, 4 and 6 consecutive days, and includes more than fifty museums and monuments, among them the Louvre, Orsay, Versailles, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie, the Arc de Triomphe, the Orangerie, Rodin, Picasso, Cluny and Quai Branly. The prices quoted for 2026 are around 85 euros for two days, 105 for four and 125 for six, but sources differ on this and some resellers list higher figures: check on the official site parismuseumpass.fr before buying.
⚠️ The important thing to know about the pass, which explains why so many people are turned away: the pass does not replace the booking. There are nine sites that still require a booked time slot even for pass holders, and they are the most sought-after ones: the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, Versailles, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie, the Orangerie, the Hôtel de la Marine, the Cité de l’Architecture and the towers of Notre-Dame. Buying the pass and turning up at the Sainte-Chapelle without a slot means not getting in.
So the arithmetic goes like this: the pass pays off if you do at least three big museums a day, and if you do not, it only simplifies matters. And in any case, of the nine works in this article, four are free and the pass has nothing to do with them.
⚠️ The Centre Pompidou is closed for works: do not count it in your plans, whatever you read in many out-of-date articles.
If you want to weigh up the pass, you can compare the 2, 4 or 6-day Paris Museum Pass and see whether the sums work for your selection. Remember what I wrote above: it does not exempt you from the nine compulsory bookings.
If you have time to spare
Three additions, in order of how free they are.
The first is Place des Vosges, the oldest square in Paris and one of the most successful pieces of town planning in Europe: four identical sides of brick and stone, with a garden in the middle. You visit it by walking in it, and it costs nothing. I have written about it in the article on Place des Vosges.
The second is the churches of Paris, which are the city’s great free reserve: inside there are paintings, sculptures and organs that in another city would be the star piece of the civic museum. The seven I recommend, not counting Notre-Dame, are in the article on the churches to visit in Paris.
The third is the Eiffel Tower, which belongs on a list of artworks in full: it is a piece of engineering that became sculpture by popular acclaim, against the opinion of the artists of its own time. Its story is in the article on the Eiffel Tower.
And the last piece of advice, which is the most important of all. If you have two days in Paris, do not do two big museums. Do the Sainte-Chapelle early in the morning and the Louvre on the afternoon of the following day, and walk in between. Paris is a city where the works of art are also outside the museums, on the façades, in the squares and inside the open churches, and anyone who spends two days queuing at ticket offices does not notice them.
