Ile de la Cité
Notre Dame Cathedral visit
Ile St. Louis
Dinner in Latin Quarter
Details: Paris city walk
This city was made for walking. Stroll grand boulevards with sweeping views of the city, pristine parks with trees planted in perfect rows, and narrow streets crowded with vendors selling flowers, pastries and cheese. Then head to the Île de la Cité, a small island in the Seine, to see Notre Dame Cathedral. Look up at the great stone buttresses, grotesque gargoyles, and massive stained-glass windows.
Details: Latin Quarter visit
Visit one of the original college towns. Since the Sorbonne’s founding in the 1100s, the Left Bank has attracted not only intellectuals but also the cafés, bookstores, and cinemas that tend to accompany them. It’s also attracted its fair share of famous residents – a plaque marks one of Hemingway’s apartments on rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, and the imposing neoclassical Panthéon holds the tombs of Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie.
Details: Louvre visit
The world's largest art museum, the Louvre is housed in a medieval fortress-turned-castle so grand it's worth a tour itself. You walk through the 71-foot glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei and added in 1989, and step into another world-one with carved ceilings, deep-set windows, and so many architectural details, you could spend a week just admiring the rooms. But check out the art on the walls. The Mona Lisa is here, as well as the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory (the headless statue, circa 200 BC, discovered at Samothrace). The Louvre has seven different departments of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and antiquities. Don't miss the Egyptian collection, complete with creepy sarcophagi, or the collection of Greek ceramics, one of the largest in the world. (Please note the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays.)
Details: Paris Sewer Museum visit
The curious have been touring the Paris sewers since the 1850’s. Visit what Victor Hugo called the Paris below Paris, “…a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form." Experience the Paris Sewers Museum, which is located beneath the Quai d’Orsay on the Left Bank, is a popular destination for anyone interested in how a major metropolitan city manages its waste and water recycling.