City Overview

Paris is one of the world's great cities and is easy to negotiate even on the first visit. The périphérique and boulevard circulaire ring roads enclose a core of 105 sq km (40 sq miles), the heart of which is small enough to walk across in an afternoon. There is an extensive (and cheap) metro network, augmented by an efficient rapid transit system (the RER). The 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. Today Paris offers the visitor a selection of over 80 museums and 200 art galleries. 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 neighborhood is the Ile-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 52BC.

The island is today dominated by the magnificent 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 activity (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 de 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, you will encounter a collection of museums and galleries known as the Trocadero, a popular meeting place for young Parisians. A short walk to the north is the Place Charles de Gaulle, known to Parisians as the Etoile 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-Elysées (Elysian Fields), justly famous for its cafés, commercial art galleries and sumptuous shops. At the other end of the avenue, the powerful axis is continued by the Place de la Concorde, the Jardin des Tuileries (where model sailing boats may be rented by the hour) and finally the Louvre.

The Palais du Louvre is in the process of reconstruction and reorganization. The most controversial addition to the old palace, a pyramid with 666 panes of glass, 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 program. In 1996, a labyrinth of subterranean galleries, providing display areas, a conference and exhibition center, design shops and restaurants was opened. The Carrousel and Tuileries Gardens are to be re-landscaped in the final stage of the redevelopment program.

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 metro lines and is a good starting point for a tour of the city. There are scores of restaurants in the maze of small streets around Les Halles; every culinary style is practiced at prices to suit every pocket. Further east, beyond the Boulevard Sebastopol, is the post-modern 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. The Centre Pompidou is Paris' premier tourist attraction, having surpassed the Eiffel Tower in popularity in its first year.

East again, in the Marais district, are the Carnavalet and Picasso Museums, housed in magnificent town houses dating from the 16th and 18th centuries respectively. One of the best-known districts in Paris is Montmartre, which stands on a hill overlooking the Right Bank. A funicular railway operates on the steepest part of the hill, below Sacré-Coeur. Local entrepreneurs have long capitalized 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 Villete, 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 cafés, 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 cafés. 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 centers (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 Bazaar 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 Ile-de-France (the area surrounding Paris) can still be seen at the magnificent châteaux of Versailles, Rambouillet and Fontainebleau on the outskirts of Paris.

We are confident that you will find Paris to be a wonderful place to study French in France!

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