Bienvenue, or welcome, to our series of posts on Paris, France.

We invite you to travel with us over the next month to the City of Love.  Spend a lazy afternoon in a café, wander through the Louvre and learn the history of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, Wife of Francesco Giacondo” and explore one of the most evocative sites in Paris, the Place de la Bastille.

Escape with us on our journey as we go off the beaten path and discover the must-see gems of this great French city.

Enjoy sipping on a cafe au lait at a French bistro with your true love on your Paris Honeymoon.

Stroll hand-in-hand along the Champs-Elysées, savor an intimate dinner in a Paris bistro, enjoy romantic views from the top of the Eiffel Tower—and do it all surrounded by that famous Parisian joie de vivre!

For more romantic inspiriation, view the Paris Photo Gallery part of the Places of a Lifetime series from National Geographic Traveler magazine.

Paris in the 1920s was a golden age for financially-challenged American writers, who flocked here for the excellent exchange rate for the dollar and the liberated lifestyle – not to mention the hottest art scene in the world.  Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his flamboyant wife Zelda, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings all staked a claim in the capital of Jazz Age Europe (and were joined by Irishman James Joyce, Brit George Orwell and a bevy of Russian and Eastern European geniuses).  Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone who comes to Paris looks forward to its restaurants – famous institutions like Taillevent, Guy Savoy and Faugeron roll off the tongues of world gourmands – and it has remained that way for more than 200 years. Starting in the Middle Ages, aristocrats traditionally ate in their own homes unless they were traveling, when they brought along their own cooks. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagining Paris without the Eiffel Tower is like London without Big Ben or San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. But no sooner had the architect Gustav Eiffel beaten his 700 competitors in the design competition for the 1889 Centennial Exposition, celebrating a century since the French Revolution, than a vocal outcry began to halt construction of the edifice. Read the rest of this entry »