Historic Paris: Left Bank to the Louvre

Paris, France

500 tickets 3.2 km · about 1 hr 40 mins · 12 stops · Premium walk How Walking Tickets work

ArchitectureRenaissance

This route traces Paris’s layered history from the Latin Quarter, the city’s medieval center of scholars and churches, to the Île de la Cité, where royal power, justice, and Notre-Dame stood side by side. It ends at the Louvre, which began as a medieval fortress, became a royal palace, and opened as a museum in 1793. The journey follows Paris as it changes from Roman town to university quarter to sacred monarchy and finally to museum city.

The stops

01
Place Saint-Michel
Place Saint-Michel is a nineteenth-century square on the edge of the Latin Quarter, centered on Gabriel Davioud's 1860 fountain of Saint Michael.
02
Musée de Cluny
The Musée de Cluny is France's National Museum of the Middle Ages, housed in a late medieval abbots' residence beside surviving Roman baths in the Latin Quarter.
03
Église Saint-Séverin
Église Saint-Séverin is a Gothic parish church in the Latin Quarter, known for its medieval surroundings and its unusual late Gothic ambulatory with twisting columns.
04
Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre
Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre is a twelfth-century church on the Left Bank near Square René Viviani and is one of the oldest surviving religious buildings in Paris.
05
Shakespeare and Company
Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookshop near Notre-Dame, founded in 1951 by George Whitman and named after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore.
06
Notre-Dame Cathedral (Exterior)
Notre-Dame Cathedral is the medieval cathedral of Paris on the Île de la Cité, begun in the twelfth century and rebuilt after the fire of 2019.
07
Sainte-Chapelle
Sainte-Chapelle is a thirteenth-century royal chapel on the Île de la Cité, built by Louis the Ninth to house relics including the Crown of Thorns.
08
La Conciergerie
La Conciergerie is the surviving medieval riverside portion of the old royal palace on the Île de la Cité, later used as a prison and revolutionary tribunal.
09
Place Dauphine
Place Dauphine is a triangular square laid out by Henri the Fourth on the western end of the Île de la Cité in the early seventeenth century.
10
Pont Neuf
Pont Neuf is the oldest surviving bridge across the Seine in Paris, begun in the late sixteenth century and completed under Henri the Fourth in 1607.
11
Institut de France & Pont des Arts
The Institut de France is the domed home of France's learned academies on the Left Bank, facing the Pont des Arts and the Louvre across the Seine.
12
Musée du Louvre (Pyramid)
The Musée du Louvre is the former royal palace of France, now the world's largest art museum, entered through I. M. Pei's glass pyramid opened in 1989.