Paris: Art, Food, and the Art of Living Well
Paris is the most visited city in the world, and the reason is simple: it is the finest city in the world for the things that matter most — art, food, architecture, and the quality of daily life.
Paris has been the cultural capital of the Western world for the better part of three centuries, and the city that resulted from this sustained investment in beauty — the Haussmann boulevards, the Impressionist museums, the covered passages, the brasseries — is the finest urban environment in Europe. The city is not perfect — the traffic, the bureaucracy, the occasional rudeness — but the imperfections are part of the character, and the beauty is genuine.
The Louvre is the largest art museum in the world and the most visited, and the collection — from the Venus de Milo to the Winged Victory of Samothrace to the Mona Lisa — spans 9,000 years of human civilisation. The building itself, a former royal palace, is as impressive as the collection, and the I.M. Pei glass pyramid that serves as the entrance is one of the finest pieces of 20th-century architecture in Paris.
The Musée d'Orsay, housed in a former railway station on the Left Bank, contains the world's finest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art — Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin — in a building of extraordinary beauty. The collection is displayed chronologically, and the experience of moving through the history of French painting in a single afternoon is one of the finest in European art.
The food of Paris is the finest in the world — not because every meal is extraordinary, but because the average quality is higher than anywhere else. The boulangeries that produce croissants and baguettes of genuine quality, the fromageries with their hundreds of cheeses, the bistros that serve steak frites and crème brûlée with the confidence of a tradition that has been perfected over centuries — these are the foundations of a food culture that the rest of the world has been trying to replicate for 200 years.
The Marais, the historic Jewish and gay quarter on the Right Bank, is the finest neighbourhood in Paris for walking — a grid of medieval streets lined with Renaissance hôtels particuliers (private mansions), galleries, and the finest falafel in Europe. The Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in Paris, is at the heart of the Marais and is one of the most beautiful public spaces in the city.
The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World's Fair and almost demolished in 1909, is the most visited paid monument in the world — and the view from its second floor, over the city at dusk, is one of the finest urban panoramas in Europe. The tower is best seen from the Trocadéro gardens across the Seine, particularly at night when it sparkles for five minutes at the top of every hour.
The best time to visit Paris is in spring (April to June) or autumn (September to October), when the weather is mild and the city is at its most beautiful. The summer months (July and August) are the busiest — the city receives 30 million tourists per year — but also the most festive, with the Bastille Day celebrations on July 14 and the Paris Plages (artificial beaches on the Seine) in July and August. The Christmas season (December) is the most magical time to be in Paris.
