Authorities were racing Monday to reassure the public about security at key cultural sites — and find the jewels stolen from the museum before they can be broken up and melted down.

The precious artifacts snatched from Paris’s Louvre Museum on Sunday include an emerald necklace gifted by Napoleon to his second wife and other priceless jewels.

A minute-by-minute look at the daring Louvre robbery, using maps, photos and video to unravel how one of the world’s most famous museums was breached.

Museum security concerns rise after the latest Louvre robbery, as experts recall other major art thefts, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's still-unsolved heist from 1990.

While it sounds like a plot straight from a movie, the jewelry heist at the famous Louvre Museum in Paris over the weekend was anything but fiction. Paris police were left scrambling for answers after masked burglars brazenly broke into the Louvre on Sunday 19.

Investigators were looking into the alarm systems at an institution that one expert said “wasn’t built with an obsession over security.”

Thieves at the Louvre museum stole eight items of "incalcuable" value from a collection of French crown jewels, including items belonging to Empress Eugénie, Queen Hortense and more

Paris police and leading art investigators are in a race against time to catch the thieves who stole France's crown jewels before the robbers split up the stones and the collection becomes untraceable.