Akila Apart City
The Latin Quarter, its history, its walks, and what to know before coming to Paris.
Monuments
Commissioned by a king to thank a saint, finished by a Revolution that turned it into a secular temple. Two and a half centuries of hesitation, and a dome that dominates the Latin Quarter.
Cinema
The school from La Boum, the steps where a car collects Owen Wilson at midnight, and three art-house screens in a single street.
Walks
A garden willed into being by an Italian queen bored at the Louvre, and at the end of a shaded water walk, the most novelistic fountain in Paris.
History
On the night of 10 to 11 May 1968, sixty barricades went up in a square kilometre of Paris. What remains, and how to read it in the streets.
The quarter
Three central quarters, three atmospheres, three budgets. How to choose according to what you are coming to Paris for.
Walks
Created in 1635 to grow medicinal plants, now the oldest working zoo in the world and one of the finest museums in Paris.
History
Fifty colleges, a university born in the street, a unique rood screen and a saint who turned back Attila. All of it on a hill sixty metres high.
Monuments
An Andalusian patio, a thirty-three-metre minaret and a hammam, five minutes from rue Mouffetard. And a history heavier than the mint tea served there.
History
Two Roman ruins in the middle of the Latin Quarter, one rediscovered by accident in 1869, the other never lost. And a unicorn in between.
History
Paris had two rivers. One is the Seine. The other turned mills, fed tanners, poisoned a district, and vanished under the tarmac in 1912.
Walks
A Roman road turned village street, a market that has held for centuries, and Hemingway's Paris two doors away.
History
A king leaves on crusade and has his capital walled. Eight centuries later whole sections survive, in courtyards, a sports ground and a car park.
Planning
The real journeys, with times, connections and what matters when you are pulling a suitcase.
Walks
Three kilometres of green boxes along the Seine, the most famous English-language bookshop in the world, and a quarter that still lives on books.
History
A Roman axis turned pilgrim road, then a street of printers and colleges. Two thousand years of unbroken use, on one straight line.
Walks
An eight-hour route from the Panthéon down to the Seine, back up the Mouffetard and ending in the Luxembourg. No métro.
Monuments
Anne of Austria promised a church if God gave her a son. She waited twenty-three years. The child was Louis XIV, and the church holds one of the finest domes in Paris.
History
People buy cheese there three mornings a week. Men were burned there for what they had written. The most ordinary square in the quarter is also the heaviest.
Walks
A twelfth-century church, a tree planted in 1601, a medieval carving over a doorway, and the best view of Notre-Dame. All within a hundred metres.
Akila Apart City