In the middle of the Latin Quarter, a short walk from the Sorbonne, is a museum carved out of two buildings wedged into one another: a Roman bath complex and the mansion that Jacques d’Amboise, abbot of Cluny, had built against it at the end of the 15th century. The Musée de Cluny is France’s national museum of the Middle Ages, and its most famous piece is a blue tent pitched on a red ground full of rabbits.
The museum reopened on 12 May 2022 after building work that began in 2011, and that matters to you more than it sounds: nearly every photograph you will find online shows the old rooms. It closes on Mondays, costs 12 euros, and on the first and third Thursday of the month it stays open until 21:00, which is the best moment to see the tapestries with the room almost empty.
What is a Roman bath house doing inside a museum of the Middle Ages?
Let’s begin!
1. The baths, the oldest thing in Paris you can walk into
You will start in a building a thousand years older than the Middle Ages: the Gallo-Roman baths, built from the 1st century onwards and in use until the end of the 3rd. What survives is above all the frigidarium, the cold room, and it still stands under its original vault.
Look up as soon as you walk into the room: above you is a Roman groin vault, with courses of brick surfacing through the masonry and the ribs crossing fourteen and a half metres above the floor. It is not a rebuild and it is not a cast. It is the ceiling the Parisians who came here to wash had over their heads, and it is why this museum is also the place where Paris is at its oldest.
2. The marble bath, an object you understand at once
In the same room, on a low platform, is a white marble bath with wave-carved sides and lions’ heads in relief.
Look at it closely: the inside is smooth and worn, the outside is a drapery of water frozen in stone. Of all the Roman objects in the museum it is the one you need no label for, because it is exactly what it looks like. The rooms around it are full of fragments that ask you for an effort of imagination, and this bath does not.
3. The Pillar of the Boatmen, the oldest dated monument in Paris
Which piece gave the city its name?
A stone pillar made of stacked blocks, raised in the 1st century by the nautae Parisiaci, the guild of boatmen of Lutetia, and dedicated to the emperor Tiberius, who reigned from AD 14 to 37. The city’s name comes from them. The dedication can still be read: Tib(erio) Caesare Aug(usto) Ioui Optum(o) Maxsumo nautae Parisiaci publice posierunt.
The pillar was found on 6 March 1710, while a crypt was being dug under the nave of Notre-Dame, and this is where the piece becomes extraordinary: on its blocks the Roman gods sit alongside Celtic ones, and one of those carries the name Cernunnos. That name is read on three other inscriptions as well, but this is the only document where the name and the image of the god appear together. Look for the block inscribed VOLCANVS, where the god wears a short tunic and the blacksmith’s conical cap: the museum’s label calls it the «stone of Jupiter».
4. The Lady and the Unicorn, and why the room is dark
The six tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn are in room 13, where they have hung since 18 December 2013, after a restoration begun in 2012 that removed the old lining, cleaned the wool by micro-suction and consolidated the fragile areas.
When you walk in the light will seem wrong to you. It is not: the tapestries are shown in half darkness on purpose, because light eats the reds and does not give them back. Give your eyes a couple of minutes, then start with the margins rather than the figures.
Five tapestries tell the five senses, and you will recognise them without a label. The sixth, the one in the photograph at the top of this page, has MON SEVL DESIR written across the tent, and nobody knows for certain what it means: the lady is either taking a necklace out of the casket her servant is holding or putting it back, and the sense of the whole series changes depending on which of the two gestures it is. Meanwhile, look at the meadow: rabbits, a small dog on a padded stool, a monkey crouching at the bottom centre, the lion on the left and the unicorn on the right holding two banners. The red ground is dense with small flowers woven one by one, which is what the French call mille-fleurs.
5. The heads of the Kings of Judah, found in a courtyard
Where did the statues the revolutionaries pulled off Notre-Dame end up?
A gallery of twenty-eight statues of the kings of Judah, the ancestors of Christ, ran across the front of Notre-Dame. In 1793 they were brought down, because to the people looking at them they looked like kings of France. For nearly two centuries nothing was known about those heads.
Then, in 1977, work in the courtyard of a private mansion in the 9th arrondissement, on rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, brought twenty-one of them back into the light. Nine of them are in the photograph, lined up on two rows of brackets against a wall of rough stone. Stop on the differences between them: some still have the whole crown and sharp features, one is split cleanly down the middle, another has lost everything but the mouth and the beard.
6. The golden rose of Basel, the oldest one still preserved
The last stop is a small and almost absurd object: a golden rose bush sixty centimetres high, with one large rose at the top, further flowers and buds on the side branches, hand-beaten serrated leaves and a blue stone set at the centre of the largest flower.
Go close to the leaves before you read the label: they are beaten one by one, and no two are alike. The golden rose was the gift the pope made once a year, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, the one called Laetare, to a prince who had been useful to him. This one was made in Avignon in 1330 by a Sienese goldsmith, Minucchio, whose name is known thanks to the papal archives; John XXII commissioned it and Rudolf III of Nidau, count of Neuchâtel, received it. It stayed in the treasury of Basel cathedral until 1834 and entered this museum in 1854. Golden roses were made for centuries, and this is the oldest one that survives.
Practical information
Data checked on 24 September 2026. Careful: the official site musee-moyenage.fr refuses automated requests, so I have crossed these figures between two independent sources: check them on the site before you leave, because prices and opening hours change.
Tickets. The full ticket costs 12 euros and the reduced one 10 euros, and they cover the baths, the mansion and the whole permanent collection. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 9:30 to 18:15. On the first and third Thursday of the month it stays open until 21:00. Closures. It closes on Mondays, and on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Free admission. Under-18s, jobseekers, disabled visitors and their companions get in free. The museum is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month, which is also the busiest day. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is one of those covered: with the pass you do not pay the 12 euros of the full ticket. Getting there. The entrance is at 28 rue Du Sommerard. The stop is Cluny - La Sorbonne on line 10, and Saint-Michel on line 4 is five minutes away on foot. How long to allow. The six stops take two hours, and the tapestry room alone is worth twenty minutes.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
From here on
Medieval Paris does not end here: the Sainte-Chapelle is ten minutes away on foot, across the Seine, and its windows are from the same century as much of this collection. If you are interested in how the Paris museums tell a whole age, the natural comparison is the Musée du Louvre, which begins where Cluny ends, and the Musée Carnavalet, which tells a city rather than a period. Two works at the mahJ, in the Marais, are on loan from this very museum: you will find them in mahJ.
Photo credits: frigidarium vault and Pillar of the Boatmen by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 3.0); heads of the Kings of Judah by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0); marble bath by xiquinhosilva (CC BY 2.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
