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 centre itself
is relatively compact and all areas of Paris are connected by a
highly efficient transport system, with the famous Paris
Metro an attraction in itself. Paris boasts more than 80
museums and over 200 art galleries.
La Carte
is a pass providing free admission to about 60 national and municipal
museums in and around 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 3rd 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 located
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. The 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.
The Palais du Louvre has been extensively reorganised
and reconstructed, the most controversial addition to the old palace
being a pyramid with 673 panes of glass, which juxtaposes the ultra-modern
with the classical façade of the palace. The best time to
see the pyramid is after dark, when it is illuminated. The Richelieu
Wing of the palace was inaugurated in 1993, marking the completion
of the second stage of the redevelopment programme. In 1996, a labyrinth
of subterranean galleries, providing display areas, a conference
and exhibition centre, design shops and restaurants was opened.
North of the Louvre are the Palais Royal,
the Madeleine and l’Opéra. To the
east is Les Halles, a shopping and commercial complex
built on the site of the old food market. It is at the intersection
of several métro lines and is a good starting point for a
tour of Paris. There are scores of restaurants in the maze of small
streets around Les Halles. Every culinary style
is available at prices to suit every pocket. Further east, beyond
the Boulevard Sébastopol, is the postmodern
Georges Pompidou Centre of Modern Art also known
as the ‘Beaubourg’. It provides a steady stream of surprises
in its temporary exhibition spaces (which, informally, include the
pavement outside where lively and often bizarre street-performers
gather) and houses a permanent collection of 20th-century art. In
the Marais district, are the Carnavalet
and Picasso Museums, housed in magnificent town
houses dating from the 16th and 18th centuries respectively. Still
further east, the magnificent Bibliothèque François
Mitterrand, one of the world’s most spectacular libraries,
can be reached via a new métro connection (ligne 14) whose
beautiful high-tech trains alone (they are constructed mainly of
glass) are worth the trip.
One of the best known districts in Paris, Montmartre,
became almost unbearably popular and crowded after the success in
2001 of the Hollywood blockbuster Moulin Rouge.
A funicular railway operates on the steepest part of the Montmartre
hill, taking people to the outlandish Sacré-Coeur,
a love it or hate it chocolate box architectural creation. Local
entrepreneurs have long capitalised on Montmartre’s romantic
reputation as an artist’s colony and if visitors today are
disappointed to find it a well-run tourist attraction, they should
bear in mind that it has been exactly that since it first climbed
out of poverty in the 1890s. The legend of Montmartre
as a dissolute cradle of talent was carefully stage-managed by Toulouse-Lautrec
and others to fill their pockets and it rapidly transformed a notorious
slum into an equally notorious circus. An earlier Montmartre legend
concerns St Denis. After his martyrdom, he is said to have walked
headless down the hill. The world’s first Gothic cathedral,
St Denis, was constructed on the spot where he
collapsed. Just north of Belleville (a working-class
district that produced Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier) at La
Villette, is one of Paris’ newer attractions, the
City of Science and Technology. The most modern
presentation techniques are used to illustrate both the history
and the possible future of man’s inventiveness; season tickets
are available.
One of the great pleasures of Paris is the great
number of sidewalk cafes, now glass-enclosed in wintertime, which
extends people-watching to a year-round sport in any part of the
city. There are as many Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants as there
are French cafes. North African eating places also abound, and dozens
of American Tex-Mex eateries are scattered throughout the city.
Bric-a-brac or brocante is found in a number of flea markets (marché
aux puces) on the outskirts of town, notably at the Porte
de Clignancourt. There are several antique centres, Louvre
des Antiquaires, Village Suisse, etc) where genuine antique
furniture and other objects are on sale. Amongst the larger department
stores are the Printemps and the Galeries
Lafayette near the Opéra, the Bazar
Hôtel de Ville (BHV) and the Samaritaine
on the Right Bank and the Bon Marché
on the Left Bank. The remains of the great forests of the Île-de-France
(the area surrounding Paris) can still be seen at the magnificent
châteaux of Versailles, Rambouillet and Fontainebleau
on the outskirts of Paris.
The capital’s nightlife has never looked healthier. The ‘beautiful
people’ may have moved on to Menilmontant,
but the bustling streets of Bastille are still
a nocturnal playground for far more than just the tourists. Menilmontant
itself rewards visitors prepared to venture beyond the guidebooks
to discover the vibrant, hip, twenty-something scene.
Disneyland Resort Paris
The Disneyland Resort Paris, open year-round, lies
to the east of the capital, a complete vacation destination located
at Marne-la-Vallée , 32km (20 miles) from
Paris.
Disney’s European venture has become one of the continent’s
most popular attractions. The site has an area of 1943 hectares
(5000 acres), one-fifth the size of Paris, and includes hotels,
a campsite, restaurants, shops and a golf course, and has as its
star attractions the Disneyland Paris Theme Park
and Walt Disney Studios. Inspired by previous theme
parks, Euro Disneyland features all the famous
Disney characters plus some new attractions especially produced
to blend with its European home. The site is easily accessible by
motorway, regional and high-speed rail services, and by air. |
