Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [54]
This octagonal square, and the arcaded and colonnaded buildings around it, was built between 1687 and 1721. In March 1796, Napoleon married Josephine, Viscountess of Beauharnais, in the building that’s at No 3 in the southwest corner. Today, the buildings around the square house the posh Hôtel Ritz Paris and some of the city’s most fashionable boutiques, especially jewellery stores – place Vendôme has been synonymous with the bauble trade since the Second Empire of the mid-19th century.
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MONA LISA: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE SMILE
So much has been written – most recently (and most widely read) by Dan Brown in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code – about the painting the French call La Joconde and the Italians La Gioconda, yet so little has been known of the lady behind that enigmatic smile. For centuries admirers speculated on everything from the possibility that the subject was mourning the death of a loved one to that she might have been in love – or in bed – with her portraitist.
Mona (actually monna in Italian) is a contraction of madonna, while Gioconda is the feminine form of the surname Giocondo. With the emergence of several clues in recent years, it is has been established almost certainly that the subject was Lisa Gherardini (1479–1539?), the wife of Florentine merchant Franceso del Giocondo, and that the painting was done between 1503 and 1506 when she was around 25 years old. At the same time, tests done in 2005 with ‘emotion recognition’ computer software suggest that the smile on ‘Madam Lisa’ is at least 83% happy. And one other point remains unequivocally certain despite occasional suggestions to the contrary: she was not the lover of Leonardo, who preferred his Vitruvian Man to his Mona.
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In the centre of the square stands the 43.5m-tall Colonne Vendôme (Vendôme Column) which consists of a stone core wrapped in a 160m-long bronze spiral that’s made from hundreds of Austrian and Russian cannons captured by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. The 425 bas-reliefs on the spiral celebrate Napoleon’s victories between 1805 and 1807. The statue on top depicts Napoleon in classical Roman dress.
PALAIS ROYAL Map
place du Palais Royal, 1er; www.monuments-nationaux.fr; Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre
The Royal Palace, which accommodated a young Louis XIV for a time in the 1640s, lies to the north of place du Palais Royal and the Louvre. Construction was begun in 1624 by Cardinal Richelieu, though most of the present neoclassical complex dates from the latter part of the 18th century. It now contains the governmental Conseil d’État (State Council; Map) and is closed to the public.
The colonnaded building facing place André Malraux is the Comédie Française (Click here; Map), founded in 1680 and the world’s oldest national theatre.
Just north of the palace is the Jardin du Palais Royal (Map; 01 47 03 92 16; 6 rue de Montpensier, 1er; 7.30am-10pm Apr & May, 7am-11pm Jun-Aug, 7am-9.30pm Sep, 7.30am-8.30pm Oct-Mar), a lovely park surrounded by two arcades. On the eastern side, Galerie de Valois (Map) shelters designer fashion shops, art galleries and jewellers, while Galerie de Montpensier (Map) on the western side still has a few old shops remaining.
At the southern end there’s a controversial sculpture (Map) of black-and-white striped columns of various heights by Daniel Buren. It was started in 1986, interrupted by irate Parisians and finished – following the intervention of the Ministry of Culture and Communication – in 1995. The story (invented by Buren?) goes that if you toss a coin and it lands on one of the columns, your wish will come true.
CABINET DES MÉDAILLES ET MONNAIES Map
01 53 79 82 26; www.bnf.fr; 58 rue de Richelieu, 2e; admission free; 1-5.45pm Mon-Fri, 1-4.15pm Sat; Bourse
Housed in the original home of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is this enormous hoard of coins, medals and tokens numbering more than 500,000. There’s also an important collection of antiques, including items confiscated during the French Revolution from Ste-Chapelle and the