The 518-year-old Mona Lisa has seen many things in her life on a wall, but rarely this: almost four months with no Louvre visitors.
That’s normally sorely lacking in a museum that’s blighted by its own success: Before the pandemic, staff members walked out complaining they couldn’t handle the overcrowding, with as many as 40,000 visitors a day.The forced closure has also granted museum officials a golden opportunity to carry out long-overdue refurbishments that were simply not possible with nearly 10 million visitors a year.
“We’re taking advantage of the museum’s closure to carry out a number of major works, speed up maintenance operations and start repair works that are difficult to schedule when the museum is operating normally,” Laurent le Guedart, the Louvre’s architectural heritage and gardens director, told the Associated Press from inside the Grande Galerie.
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