Paris has a second tier of attractions that would be the main event in almost any other city, and which stay quiet because of what stands a few streets away.
The covered passages
Glass-roofed nineteenth-century arcades — around twenty survive from an original hundred and fifty.
Galerie Vivienne, the most beautiful, with mosaic floors. Passage des Panoramas, the oldest, now full of small restaurants. Passage Jouffroy and Verdeau, connected across a street.
Free, mostly in the 2nd and 9th, and walkable together in an afternoon.
The free museums
The city-run museums' permanent collections cost nothing, year round.
Musée Carnavalet — the history of Paris, in two Marais mansions.
The Petit Palais — a fine collection in a Beaux-Arts building.
Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, with Matisse's La Danse.
Maison de Balzac, Musée Bourdelle, Musée de la Vie Romantique with its garden café.
The small paid ones
Musée Jacquemart-André — a Haussmann-era mansion preserved with its collection intact and displayed as the owners arranged it. Italian Renaissance, Rembrandt, Van Dyck. Small, calm, and among the most rewarding in the city.
Musée Rodin — the garden ticket costs a fraction of full admission, and the Thinker, the Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais are all outdoors.
Musée de Cluny — medieval art in a Roman bath complex, with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.
Père Lachaise
Forty-four hectares of tombs and trees on a hillside, free.
Wilde, Morrison, Chopin, Piaf, Balzac, and thousands of elaborate nineteenth-century monuments.
Take a map at the entrance. The paths are irregular and finding specific graves without one is genuinely hard.
The neighbourhoods
Canal Saint-Martin — iron footbridges and locks, with people sitting along the water in the evening.
Belleville and Ménilmontant — the 20th, with street art and the best free view over the city from Parc de Belleville.
La Butte-aux-Cailles in the 13th, a village of low houses.
The market streets — Rue Mouffetard, Rue Montorgueil, Rue Daguerre.
Just outside
| Destination | What |
|---|---|
| Giverny | Monet's garden, roughly Apr–Oct |
| Chantilly | Château with France's second-best art collection, no queue |
| Vaux-le-Vicomte | The château that inspired Versailles |
| Saint-Denis | Basilica where French kings are buried, on the metro |
Practical
Under-18s of any nationality and EU residents under 26 enter national museums free.
Lunch, not dinner — the formule midi is roughly half the evening price.
Coffee standing at the bar is a third of the terrace price, and both are posted by law.