When I was a child, I loved the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, so I was confident I would also like the one in Paris — and I do. The one in Paris is officially called the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, with sciences in the plural Read More …
La Rotonde de la Villette was built in 1784 by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) for use as a toll house. Anyone entering the city had to stop here and pay a tax on any merchandise they were bringing with them. If you have ever seen the opera La Read More …
Nearly a thousand musical instruments and works of art are on display at the attractive and informative music museum in the Parc de la Villette in Paris. The permanent exposition covers the two hundred years from the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 19th. At the Read More …
The Parc de la Villette is in the far northeast corner of Paris. It is a 55-hectare park with 35 hectares of lawns and gardens, on the site of the former slaughterhouses of la Villette. They say this is now the largest green space in Paris, and also “a laboratory Read More …
This park is on a hill in the north-east corner of Paris, in the 19th arrondissement. It is the third largest park in Paris, after Tuileries and Villette, and it includes such unusual features as man-made cliffs (the only cliffs in Paris, as far as I know), a man-made lake, Read More …
Belleville is a traditionally working-class district in the east of Paris, straddling the 19th and 20th arrondissements. I think I first heard of Belleville from Puccini’s opera Il tabarro (the first of the three short operas of Il trittico), in which the illicit lovers Giorgetta and Luigi discover that they Read More …
After huge cost overruns and years of bitter controversy, the Paris Philharmonic concert hall (Philharmonie 1) finally went into operation in January 2015. The architect, Jean Nouvel, boycotted the opening because he said the building was not finished; the acoustics of the large hall still needed adjusting and other parts Read More …
After checking into a new hotel in a new neighborhood (or a new city) I like to take a walk around the block and see what there is in the immediate vicinity. I did this after checking in to the Hipotel Paris Belleville at 21 Rue Vicq d’Azir. When I Read More …