Paris

Paris is one of the world’s great cities: with a practically endless amount of things to do, it rewards repeated and extended visits. Despite the massive size of the city, Paris is also an easily navigable destination as the city center itself is relatively compact and all areas of Paris are connected by a highly efficient public transport system, with the famous Paris Metro, an attraction in itself. Paris boasts more than 80 museums and around 200 art galleries. La Carte is a pass providing free admission to about 60 national and municipal museums in the Paris area. The périphérique and boulevard circulaire ring roads roughly follow the line of the 19th-century city walls and within them are most of the well-known sights, shops and entertainments. Beyond the ring roads is an industrial and commercial belt, then a broad ring of suburbs, mostly of recent construction. Central Paris contains fine architecture from every period in a long and rich history, together with every amenity known to science and every entertainment yet devised.

The oldest neighbourhood is the Île-de-la-Cité, an island on a bend in the Seine where the Parisii, a Celtic tribe, settled in about the third century BC. The river was an effective defensive moat and the Parisii dominated the area for several centuries before being displaced by the Romans in about 52 BC. The island is today dominated by the newly renovated cathedral of Notre-Dame. Beneath it is the Crypte Archéologique, housing well-mounted displays of Paris’ early history.

Having sacked the Celtic city, the Gallo-Romans abandoned the island and settled on the heights along the Rive Gauche (Left Bank), in the area now known as the Latin Quarter (Boulevards St Michel and St Germain). The naming of this district owes nothing to the Roman city: when the university was moved from the Cité to the left bank in the 13th century, Latin was the common language among the 10,000 students who gathered there from all over the known world. The Latin Quarter remains the focus of most student acivity (the Sorbonne is here) and there are many fine bookshops and commercial art galleries. The Cluny Museum houses some of the finest medieval European tapestries to be found anywhere, including ‘The Field of the Cloth of Gold’. At the western end of the Boulevard St Germain is the Orsay Museum, a superb collection of 19th- and early-20th-century art located in a beautifully restored railway station.

Other Left Bank attractions include the Panthéon, the Basilica of St Séverin, the Palais and Jardin du Luxembourg, the Hôtel des Invalides (containing Napoleon’s tomb), the Musée Rodin and St-Germain-des-Prés. Continuing westwards from the Quai d’Orsay past the Eiffel Tower and across the Seine onto the Right Bank, the visitor encounters collection of museums and galleries known as the Trocadéro, a popular meeting place for young Parisians. A short walk to the north is the Place Charles de Gaulle, known to Parisians as the Étoile, and to tourists as the site of the Arc de Triomphe. It is also at the western end of that most elegant of avenues, the Champs-Élysées (Elysian Fields), which is once again famous for its cafes, commercial art galleries and sumptuous shops, rather than the dowdy airline offices and fast-food joints that took it over for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. At the other end of the avenue, the powerful axis is continued by the Place de la Concorde, the Jardin des Tuileries and, finally, the Louvre.