Boulevard du Palais This is a Wallace Fountain that I must have walked or cycled past dozens or even hundreds of times over the years, without ever stopping for a closer look — which is perhaps not surprising, since Paris has over a hundred of these ‘large model’ fountains (the Read More …
The Wallace Fountains in Paris were named after the English philanthropist and art collector Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890), who donated them to the city of Paris starting in 1872. Their purpose was to dispense safe drinking water, after the city’s public water system had been damaged during the Franco-Prussian war Read More …
When I first started writing about Paris on the now-defunct website VirtualTourist, I announced that my Paris page was going to be “ET-free” — on the grounds that VirtualTourist already had 1,178 tips on the Eiffel Tower (this was in 2006; a year later there were 82 more). I wanted Read More …
The Paris Water Pavilion is a building at 77 avenue de Versailles in the Auteuil quarter of the 16th arrondissement. It is a building from the nineteenth century that originally housed a steam-driven pump to bring up water from the Seine for the then-independent towns of Auteuil and Passy. It now Read More …
The Museum of the Sewers is one of the few places in Paris that was not closed down by the coronavirus pandemic — but only because it was already closed for other reasons. This museum, which is in fact down in the sewers at the south end of Alma Bridge, Read More …
For years I was mildly puzzled about who Saint Germain was, but only mildly. Now that I have finally looked him up, it turns out he was born around the year 496 and was Bishop of Paris from 555 until his death in 576. According to a poet called Venantius Read More …
Looking back, I think the first time I ever even read about the Paris quarter of Auteuil was in a short story by Marcel Aymé (1902–1967) called Le décret (The Decree), a story about going backwards and forwards in time in which the narrator says: “During these famous seventeen years Read More …
Before I went to Toulon I booked a guided walking tour through the website of the Toulon tourist office. It was a two-hour tour, in French, called A la découverte de l’Histoire de Toulon (Discovering the History of Toulon). I found the tour pleasant and informative, though perhaps not as Read More …
Between 2006 and 2012 the University ‘Paris Diderot – Paris 7’ (named after the eighteenth century French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot) gradually moved out of the dreadful Jessieu Campus and into this new ‘Paris Rive Gauche Campus’ on the left bank of the Seine. It is about three kilometers Read More …