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The Carnavalet Museum – the museum of the history of Paris – reopens

Art and Culture, Our favourite things

After a massive overhaul lasting four years, the wonderful (free!) Carnavalet Museum is back, renovated, bigger than ever and wheelchair accessible, finally! And a lot more has changed…

© Pierre Antoine / Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

As we obviously love Paris and are interested by its history, we visited the Carnavalet Museum for the blog quite a few years back. It was a fascinating place, but obviously need of a makeover. Now, the city council has done just that – four years and 58.3 million euros later, almost everything had changed:

— The beautiful building’s façade (actually two buildings together) has all been restored, and in the sweet gardens you’ll find a new café-restaurant.

— The ticket desk area has been reorganised and the coat check expanded. Lifts and ramps have also been added so the museum is now 99.5% accessible to visitors with reduced mobility (the remaining 0.5% cannot be modified because the museum is a listed building).

— The 3,800 works (from a collection of 625,000) that were previously on show have all been restored, and so have all the exhibition rooms.

— The visit order and presentation have been renewed (everything is now presented chronologically) with two rooms at the beginning of the visit to present Paris, and brand new rooms on the vaulted stone basement. In all, the museum is now spread over 4.000m².

— All the presentation texts have been translated into English and Spanish, and digital terminals have been added. 10% of the objects on show are at a good height for children.

© Pierre Antoine / Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Above all, the museum is still free (apart from the temporary exhibitions). A large exhibition of photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson is opening on 15th June 2021 – we’ll be telling you more about that very soon!

We can’t wait to return to the Carnavalet Museum. Don’t forget that for the moment, you have to book your free ticket online (here) before you go.

© Cyrille Weiner

The Carnavalet Museum (here) is open Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-6pm

Admission: free! Tickets to be booked online here

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