Nutsmuggling

The most characteristic feature of the French capital, to untrained Italian eyes, is the magnitude of its boulevards and buildings; almost any building or street is wider or taller than you’d expect. The town looks like it’s been designed for perspectives rather than for simple “stares”; it looks magnificent in its geometry, but a closer inspection reveals an excess of white walls and uniformity, to my liking at least.
An example is the Pantheon. It can only be described as huge and tall, a perfect icon of the Empire’s grandeur. And then? Nothing special, just a colonnade, a dome and three huge, empty marble walls. Marble is nice, but in small quantities; such wastes of plain marble seems to me a symbol of superficiality: “I’ll give everything for a shiny surface, that’s enough for me”.

Huge buildings abound in the city, which is laid down as a neat grid on the map. This urban structure is the result of the radical restoration of the urban structure brought by Georges Eugène Haussmann, who was apparently obsessed by straight lines and uniformity. Of course we Italians shouldn’t be bothered by straight lines, our Romans hated bends and did their best to build cities as grids. But then something happened, called the Middle Age, and some sanity, disguised as chaos, infiltrated into the rigid pattern of Roman towns. So now most Italian art cities feature small alleys, unequal buildings and an overlapping of historical layers that few spots on the world can sport. My eyes, probably accustomed to this variety, are sort of offended by Paris’s clear-cut boulevards and building of equal style and height.
Of course it is exactly this Paris, the Paris of the boulevard, that most tourists love and admire. Still, too much white for my liking, and the pale blue of the roofs gets a bit boring after a while.

Then there are special places. The magnitude of the cities allows the existence of sub-towns within the city. Montmartre is charming, if you manage to avoid the crowds of tourist of the alleys at the top. Saint Germain and the Latin quarter are also very nice, and I like them precisely because of their smallness and for the chaos of their streets and people, which greatly contrasts with the neatness of the main boulevards. Bastille is also a nice area, whose shopping street resembles a bit British and Irish towns.

Then there are some magical spots. The Louvre’s pyramids make a nice contrast ti the massive building:

The view of the Notre Dame cathedral from the Seine is something.

I loved the Orsay, a train station restored in a modern style and turned into a museum, here grandeur is at its finest, and mingles well with history.

The Seine can be seen from behind the massive clock of the former Orsay station:

Here’s a slightly over-saturated view of the Luxembourg Garden:

And of course there are thousands of nice restaurants, where you can eat almost everything that comes to your mind.

My overall impression is that Paris is city that manages to stay beautiful despite the efforts to make it grey and white of its chief urbanists. It is no doubt a place to be seen, although I am not sure I’d like living there. Apart for the restaurants.

Davide