The Palace of Versailles is to be given a €400 million restoration that will take 20 years. “The Sun King’s 700-room palace and 800-hectare (2,000-acre) garden are to be given a long-overdue facelift aimed at restoring their lost sparkle – recapturing their architectural purity and rendering them safe for the 10 million people who visit each year. This is the first big restoration programme for Versailles since the early 1800s, and the biggest such undertaking in France since the remodelling of the Louvre in the late 1900s.”