The street that is now called rue Corvisart, (after Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, the personal physician of Napoléon I) was formerly called rue Champ-de-l’Alouette (Street of the Field of the Lark). It is in the Croulebarbe Quarter of the 13th arrondissement. In the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Jean Valjean led Read More …
On National Street (Národní ulice) near the National Theater (Národní divadlo) there is an ugly parking lot with an interesting mural behind it, showing tanks and bulldozers chasing each other along an endless strip of the type known as a Möbius strip (named after one its discoverers, the German mathematician Read More …
In February 2011, the street artists Jana & JS (Jana Balluch and Jean-Sébastien Philippe) were commissioned to make two large wall paintings on these new buildings at 110 rue Jeanne d’Arc in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. The paintings show the artists themselves, taking photos of each other. They have Read More …
This fort is on a hill at the northwest end of Besançon, on the opposite side of the city from the Citadel. It was named after an Italian engineer and architect called Jean Griffoni, who built a small fort on this site in 1595. (So it was not named after Read More …
This ‘Convent of the Ropes’ was founded towards the end of the 13th century by Marguerite de Provence, the widow of the French King Louis IX, who is now better known as ‘Saint Louis’ because he was canonized twenty-seven years after his death. Marguerite was nearly fifty when her husband Read More …
The Butte-aux-Cailles is a small neighborhood on a small hill (the word butte means ‘small hill’) in the 13th arrondissment of Paris, with relatively small houses and lots of friendly little pubs and restaurants full of arty-looking people. The word caille means ‘quail’ in French, but that’s not where the Read More …