When I got back to my hotel in Paris it was nearly two in the morning and I was wide awake from an invigorating bicycle ride, so instead of going straight to bed I fired up my netbook to see what had transpired on VirtualTourist during my absence. It happened Read More …
In the Royal Opera in the north wing of Versailles Palace I saw an elaborate performance of the musical comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by the playwright Molière (1622-1673) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687).
For the large formal gardens behind his palace at Versailles, King Louis XIV commissioned dozens of white marble statues showing healthy young women with good posture, many of them dressed in nothing more than a bed sheet wrapped around them in some suggestive way. To avoid giving the impression that Read More …
Looking northwest from behind the Versailles palace, we have a wide view of the gardens and park. The Apollo Fountain is in the foreground, the Grand Canal in the rear. In the middle, as of 2015, was an installation by the British artist Anish Kapoor, born in India in 1954. Read More …
An advance ticket is a sensible thing to have if you visit Versailles in the summer (or spring or autumn) and intend to have a look at the rooms inside the palace. Otherwise you may well find yourself standing in line for a long time to get a ticket, as Read More …
My original intention was to ride around Paris on the Vélib’ bikes during the day and just come out to Versailles for the evening performance at the Royal Opera, but it turned out to be such a rainy day that all my Paris plans ‘fell into the water’, as the Read More …