Which Louvre is better: The OG in Paris or the striking gem in Abu Dhabi?

The Louvre in Paris is the most popular museum in the world, sitting with stern majesty on the Right Bank of the Seine river.

Once the palace of Bourbon kings, it was converted into a public art gallery by the French revolutionary government in August 1793. It is a huge museum that can barely be explored in a single day.

You'd be best advised to choose in advance what you most want to see, and the majority pick Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Crowds throng around the famous trio, jostling for selfies, while nearby masterworks wait lonely and ignored.

Visitors enter via a courtyard where they are filtered through IM Pei's Pyramid of steel and glass, which looks like it belongs somewhere else - perhaps in a large market garden where horticulturists are experimenting with growing triangular tomatoes.

You should buy your ticket in advance, unless you really enjoy waiting in long queues in courtyards.

IM Pei's Pyramid entrance opened in the bicentenary year of the revolution in 1989, and shares the same proportions as the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Louvre's galleries of Egyptology are among the most impressive spaces in the museum.

The museum's collections offer countless breathtaking examples of the barely believable aesthetic achievements of the civilisations of Classical antiquity.

I spend most of my time marvelling at relics of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and, of course, the Roman Empire (which video-hosting service TikTok has conclusively shown to monopolise the thinking of adult males the world over).

But I also love the classic 19th-century French paintings such as Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa and Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. It's a rare and precious privilege to stand before such important works.

But it's a bit difficult to find your way around the vast estate of the Louvre. The signposting is oddly amateurish, and you might be better off using your GPS to navigate the galleries.

In the atrium of the Louvre, I foolishly buy my lunch from Paul, not realising it's a branch of an international sandwich chain. The chicken-and-tomato baguette tastes of nothing at all: I might as well have eaten the rather elegant packaging.

But there are many far better places to get a meal in and around the Louvre. Next time, I'll try Bistrot Benoit inside the Pyramid - although even the McDonald's in the Carrousel du Louvre between the museum and the Metro station would be preferable to Paul.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the 77th most visited museum in the world. It officially opened in November 2017, more than two centuries after the Louvre in Paris. It is not a branch of the older museum, but has an agreement to use the Louvre name for 30 years.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is supposed to feel organic, as if it has existed forever in an emirate where only 50 years ago nothing much existed at all - and, at some level, it succeeds in transcending its surrounds. It is an improbable achievement, an architectural masterpiece, and the best that oil money could buy.

The museum is crowned by a dome that weighs almost as much as the Eiffel Tower, and creates its own microclimate of raining light. The cupola glitters with a private gallery of more than 8000 stars. The Louvre Abu Dhabi decorates the coastline of Saadiyat Island. The water meets and enters the land, flowing into the design of the building, which incorporates a lake that serves as a sea turtle rehabilitation area.

A woman in the pool feeds lettuce leaves to the turtles - which is something you just don't see in Paris. There is so much water in the Abu Dhabi Louvre that the gallery employs a team of lifeguards.

The gallery aspires to tell 4000 years of the cultural history of the world through a collection of art and artefacts that is largely on loan from the major French museums - predominantly the Louvre.

It is wonderfully ambitious and exhilaratingly successful. Going through the collection, I really do feel as though I am traversing the breadth and the best of human civilisation in a single morning.

One jarring note is Cy Twombly's imaginatively titled series of nine paintings, Untitled I-IX, which fills an entire room. Painted in 2009, the Untitleds are among the newest works in the gallery and presented as if they represent a recent peak in human creative imagination. It would be more honest to hang an iPhone 15.

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For lunch, I enjoy a deliciously spicy lamb biryani at the Museum Cafe, which is really a high-quality, licensed waterside restaurant that also sells coffee.

There's also a branch of the pricier French restaurant Fouquet in the complex and an inviting cocktail bar, Marta's.

Opening hours: When it first opened in 1793, Louvre Paris kept to the 10-day week of the new revolutionary calendar, but this idea did not catch on. Now it's open 9am-6pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 9am-9:45pm Friday. The museum is closed on Tuesday. The Abu Dhabi Louvre complex is open Tuesday-Sunday, 10am to midnight, although galleries and exhibitions close at 6.30pm weekdays and 8.30pm weekends. The museum is closed on Monday.

Admission: In Paris, adult advance-purchase tickets cost about $28. Children under 18 get in free. In Abu Dhabi, adult tickets cost about $26; children under 13 get in free.

Explore more: louvre.fr/en; louvreabudhabi.ae

Pictures: Shutterstock; Unsplash