All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Paris, 1978. Elaine Sciolino was a 29-year-old cub reporter for Newsweek, the junior member, and only woman, in a bureau staffed by much older men. For assignments, she got the leftovers—“soft” stuff, which in Paris mostly meant food and fashion. Newsweek happened to share an office with The Washington Post, and Sciolino’s first break came when the paper’s legendary fashion editor Nina Hyde took her under her wing. Soon she was attending prêt-à-porter shows, meeting Yves Saint Laurent and his model muses, dining at Karl Lagerfeld’s stunning Left Bank apartment. It was a glamorous introduction to journalism in the City of Light.
Then, her beat changed overnight. An obscure Iranian cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in the quiet suburb of Neauphle-le-Château in exile, and none of the senior correspondents wanted to make the trek. But Sciolino was game. Armed with charm, persistence, and chutzpah, she became the first woman—and first American—to interview the ayatollah. When the revolution erupted in Tehran, Newsweek chose her to board Khomeini’s chartered flight back to Iran. She took with her $20,000 in cash, a shortwave radio, a portable typewriter in a blue eggshell case, and one change of clothing.
“I was young and foolish and single,” she later told Terry Gross, reflecting on the dangers she brushed off as a woman journalist flying into the Islamic Revolution.
Sciolino eventually joined The New York Times, where she built a distinguished career as United Nations bureau chief, CIA correspondent, and the paper’s first female chief diplomatic correspondent, among other roles. She later returned to Paris, this time to lead the Times bureau there during the George W. Bush years—the era of “Freedom Fries.” Yet Paris was no longer just a professional assignment; it would become her permanent home, and the throughline of her next four books.
The first was 2011’s La Séduction, a sharp analysis of how seduction—not merely romantic but also intellectual, culinary, and political —infuses nearly every aspect of French life. While plenty of Americans have written about what the French can teach us (Bringing Up Bébé, French Women Don’t Get Fat, etc.), Sciolino’s was that rare book written by an American that French people could read to understand themselves. She followed up its success with a bestselling portrait of her own street, the Rue des Martyrs (2015’s The Only Street in Paris), and 2019’s The Seine: The River That Made Paris, tracing the river from its mythical beginnings as a wellspring of Gallic culture to its unlikely future as an Olympic swimming venue.
Now, with Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, she turns to perhaps her most formidable subject yet. A storied institution, the Louvre is currently in a state of flux: After reports on its “dire” conditions leaked to the press, President Emmanuel Macron announced a major, $800 million renewal effort—including plans to give the Mona Lisa her own gallery (something Sciolino had earlier suggested in this book). The world’s most visited museum is now undergoing an upheaval of its own—and Sciolino, true to form, was there to witness the revolution.
I first met Sciolino 15 years ago, back when I was a very green news clerk at the Times, patching correspondents through to editors. It was frantic, operator-style work that left little room for small talk—but Sciolino always made time to chat. She was part mentor, part confidante, and part matchmaker, regularly inquiring about my dating prospects.
I recently caught up with Sciolino by phone to talk about how she cracked the Louvre’s armor—and fell in love with the museum in the process. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Vogue: I’ve spent some time with you in Paris, and I often hear you use the word partage. Can you define that word and explain how it typifies your approach to stories—and how you brought that approach to this book on the Louvre?
Elaine Sciolino: Partage means sharing, but it also means being curious—curious about the other, no matter who the other is. It could be somebody sitting next to you on an airplane, a little kid in a museum, or someone you’re having a meal with. It first really hit me on this project when I brought the Louvre s curator of paintings to have lunch at Guy Savoy. Even though Guy is considered by some to be the greatest chef in the world, he’s incredibly down-to-earth. One of his signature dishes, perhaps the signature dish, is an artichoke soup with truffles and butter brioche. Before we ate the soup we looked at Chardin’s painting of a brioche. And Guy said, “That brioche is burnt!” Poor Sébastien Allard, the head curator of paintings, got this horrified look on his face at the idea that Chardin, the master of the perfect still life, would have burnt brioche in his painting. But it sparked a beautiful exchange between the two of them. Guy isn’t an art expert and Sébastien isn’t a foodie, yet they connected over this painting. That’s partage, the ability to create common ground. And it’s that creation of common ground that you always want to achieve, no matter what the conflict, tension, or challenge is. That, to me, is the key to journalism, and it’s the key to life.
Right. And those shared moments of discovery connected to art happen over and over again in this book. I think the accumulated effect is that you manage to humanize a museum that is usually described as elitist, overwhelming, unwelcoming. Was that your intention when you set out?
Right from the beginning, that is exactly what I tried to do, to treat the Louvre as this living, breathing character, not just a collection of stones that was a fortress, then a palace, and then a museum that has undergone 20-some renovations over the centuries and is still impossible to master. I mean, if you can believe it, I just got lost in the Louvre the other day. Here I am, I’ve written this book on the Louvre, giving my husband’s cousin Wayne a tour of the museum, and I got completely lost for at least 20 minutes. It’s a frustrating place.
And a frustrating place to try to report on. My understanding is that the museum did not exactly welcome you with open arms.
The Louvre was the most bureaucratic, toughest institution I have ever faced in France. When I started out, they circulated a confidential document that said cooperating with me on the book could be a “risk.” It banned all officials from talking to me unless they had received prior authorization. They also made sure a designated person—my Louvre “minder”—would follow me around the museum. I’m somebody who had the cell phone number of the head of the DGSE, the French CIA. I’ve interviewed four French presidents and this is what I faced in the Louvre. I had friends saying to me, “Drop the project.” I had one diplomat friend, a very senior ex-ambassador, say, “The Louvre is worse than North Korea.” Another person who had been the head of a very important French cultural institution told me, “Why don’t you do Versailles instead?”
Your book is not at all a travel guide, and yet there are many moments when you offer practical advice or show by example how somebody can have a more intimate experience with the Louvre. One of the most fascinating to me was the story about the Consultation Room of the Graphic Arts Department, this little jewel box where, in theory, anyone can handle masterworks on paper by Leonardo, Raphael, Ingres—provided they know how to get there.
It’s truly magical if you manage to get in. You choose original works you want to see, hold them up close in this quiet, library-like space. It’s a totally different Louvre that almost no one knows about.
As fascinated as you are by this institution, there are obviously lots of things about it that you don’t like or think can be improved—and you say as much. At the top of your wish list is putting Mona Lisa in a gallery of her own, something that now appears to be happening. What do you think about that?
Oh, you’ve got to get that painting out of that room! First of all, she’s got the wrong neighbors. She’s this Florentine beauty, done in all these subtle colors, and she’s surrounded by all these gaudy Venetian neighbors. And some of them are huge. I mean, The Wedding Feast at Cana is the biggest painting in the whole museum, and it’s just opposite her. She’s this tiny little thing, 20 inches by 30 inches, facing this painting the size of a small Paris apartment. It just doesn’t match up. She can’t really talk to it. There’s no partage!
You spent a lot of time talking to curators, who obviously have incredible levels of expertise. Sometimes their enthusiasm is contagious, other times a little amusing. I’m thinking about the curator who spent countless hours rifling through broken pieces of Greek statuary in the bowels of the Louvre and by chance discovered a missing tip of a wing that belonged to one of the museum’s show-stopping masterpieces, The Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Just imagine being the guy who’s in charge of Greek antiquities. He’s got all these drawers filled with pieces. And he starts playing with them and he discovers a piece that he thinks might be a feather on her left wing—and eventually it seems to fit! Now, it took forever to get it all worked out because the Louvre is the ultimate bureaucracy, so you had to have an international panel and conferences and teams at the Louvre making sure that the feather indeed did fit. But it changed the whole shape of the left wing of The Winged Victory of Samothrace. His name is Ludovic Laugier and I want to call it the “Laugier feather.” It’s an extraordinary story.
The Mona Lisa is obviously the most famous portrait in the Louvre, but it’s far from your favorite. Can you tell me about a painting that you prefer?
It’s a portrait of a condottiere, which sometimes means a mercenary, by Antonello da Messina, a Sicilian, that reminds me a lot of my Sicilian relations. And he’s just beautiful. I think of him because I once asked the head curator of paintings to give me other paintings that he liked better than the Mona Lisa. One of them, he said, was Titian’s Man with a Glove, which sits in the same room as Mona Lisa. Man with a Glove is very beautiful and very refined. Dame Judi Dench once said in an interview that if she were ever on a desert island, she would take that painting with her because she would want to look at him all day. But for me, he’s a little too pretty. So I would really like my mercenary who’s got a little scar on his lip, because I think he’d be better taking care of me on the desert island.
I think that people have this idea of museum-going as only about the interaction between you and the works. Yet reading your book, I see the value that you get from bringing other people—whether they be experts or regular museumgoers—into the conversation, so it becomes more of a social affair. How do you think somebody who’s visiting the Louvre can take some of that spirit of partage into their visit?
It’s funny because I was thinking about this the other day. This Louvre is now open on Wednesday nights and Friday nights, and it’s got a much younger crowd. If I were on the dating market today, I’d go to the Louvre then. I’d go sit in front of a painting or stand in line waiting to see the Mona Lisa, and I promise you’re going to meet somebody interesting.
Well, you have to summon the courage to strike up a conversation. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable intruding on someone else’s experience.
No, I’m gonna stop you right there. If you are brave enough to do this ridiculous online dating swiping thing, then you are brave enough to go to the Louvre and look around and ask yourself, “Are there any interesting men or women in this room who I might want to meet?” And then just say hi.
One thing I’ve always admired is how comfortable you are just being yourself. I know plenty of Americans in Paris, and for some there’s almost a competition to out-French the French—to master cultural codes, to pass. Obviously, you’re culturally and linguistically fluent, yet you don’t try to blend in completely. You’re not ashamed of your American accent. You’re quick to talk about growing up in Buffalo and your Sicilian roots. I think that opens doors and invites conversation in ways a quiet, fly-on-the-wall approach wouldn’t. Was this something you developed over your career?
I learned very early in journalism that you have to be yourself—it’s the only way to connect. When I started as a national correspondent for Newsweek in Chicago, I had to interview wheat farmers in South Dakota. Coming from the west side of Buffalo, I had nothing in common with them, but I needed to find common ground—to understand what it’s like to lose a year’s crop in a drought.
That’s always been my approach, especially abroad: build a connection. Journalism became a great equalizer; cultural rules and class differences fall away, and suddenly you’re on equal footing. That’s incredibly liberating. I’ve always stayed true to that, openly being myself, comfortable as an outsider but determined to connect. That’s crucial not only in journalism, but also in life—especially now, as we face profound crises in the US, in Europe, everywhere. All we can really do is seek common ground with family, friends, and strangers alike, and hope our shared humanity prevails.
