Bonjour Paris

This is the 50th in a series of walking tours highlighting the sites and stories of diverse districts of the Paris region The tiled mural on platform 1 at the Bastille metro station is curiously picture-book in style yet it depicts one of the bloodiest chapters in the city’s history. A worker in a symbolic red cap sets about the brickwork of the hated Bastille prison with a p...

It’s 1928 in Paris, and a curious circus has arrived in the City of Light. Days-of-yore circus acts like the super-strong man, a ventriloquist, high divers, knife throwers, and clairvoyants fill this traveling circus, which has arrived in Paris. Among the bizarre acts is “Venus électrique,” the electric woman who has lightning bolts shooting out of her fingers and offers – “f...

Having been brought up on the East Coast of the U.S., I thought I fully understood what a summer heat wave felt like. But a Parisian canicule is an entirely different beast and there is no LBI here. After too few days of recovering from jet lag, I read that the city had uniquely permitted swimming in the canals to help residents deal with the stifling air. Seeking any repriev...

For five decades, Parisian flâneur and winemaker Jonathan Pey has explored Paris’s hidden corners and, more recently, historic fountains. From Gallo-Roman aqueducts to Second Empire grandeur and modern design, join us on this visually stunning exposé as he reveals how visionary leaders transformed the need for clean drinking water into the striking public art we know today as...

The ever-popular Henri Matisse draws crowds at any exhibition in Paris, elsewhere in France or abroad. That’s a given. Currently, there are two new ways to explore a little-known aspect of his life and work, namely the burst of creativity he enjoyed in his last decade, during and after World War II. At the blockbuster exhibition, Matisse 1941-1954, showing at the Grand Palais...