A walk around the 5th & 6th Arrondissment.
There are a lot of beautiful parks in Paris and perhaps the most famous is the Tuileries Garden that sits next to the Louvre Palace. However I have to say that the Luxembourg Gardens makes a case for being the most attractive garden in Paris. It makes a great place to start any tour of the St Germain and Latin Quarter districts of the city. In 2016 when I last completed this attractive walk, we had booked ourselves into an apartment on Rue de Canettes for 5 days which was just up the street from the wonderful Place St Sulpice. It gave me the opportunity to visit the surrounds of this old church a number of times. From Saint-Sulpice it is just a short walk down to one of the entries into the ‘grande’ Jardin.
I visited Paris by myself in 2007 and I spent one of my mornings walking around the Latin Quarter before finding myself outside Saint-Sulpice in the middle of a book market. This visit to the area was entirely based on the fact that the novel I had just finished reading at the time was Tracey Chevalier’s 2004 book, The Lady and the Unicorn. I must have done some background reading at the time that told me the famous tapestry from the Middle Ages that was the central feature of this novel was in fact on display in the Musee de Cluny. This institution was just down the road from the Ile de la Cite so that was the main target of my morning in Paris at that time.
I must have been reading my Paris map after I emerged from my visit to Musee de Cluny which no doubt explains my unplanned arrival at the Pantheon, a few blocks down Rue St Jacques. I had never heard of the Pantheon before in my life and I was probably more stunned by this building than I was by my visit to the Tapestry Museum. After strolling around in awe of the inside of the Pantheon, I must have afterwards began wandering the streets of the neighbourhood but I still managed to miss the Luxembourg Gardens. I found myself outside the huge Church of Saint-Sulpice where the main activity was a marketplace for books rather than religious activities
The next time I returned to Paris I was very pleased to find ourselves just up the road from Saint-Sulpice so it became a favourite part of my early morning walk over the days we spent there.
The stroll around Paris suggested by the map above will hopefully provide a more focused tour of this area of Paris than my own first aimless stroll around these two famous Parisian districts.
Musee de Cluny…Roman Paris
St Sulpice
FOGTRAVEL 