Students, Saints and Gladiators: Paris's Latin Quarter from the Sorbonne to the Panthéon

Two thousand years on one hill in Paris: Roman baths and a gladiators' arena, the oldest tree in the city, a pendulum that proves the Earth turns, Hemingway's first flat and a mosque with a wartime secret

Paris · 12 stops · 29 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Fontaine Saint-Michel: The Archangel at the Bottom of the Boulevard

   Place Saint-Michel, 75006 Paris, France

   Listen · 2:25

   Stand in front of the great wall of stone at the corner of the square, where water tumbles over the steps and a bronze archangel, wings spread wide, plants his foot on a devil with a very bad expression. Ask any Parisian where to meet in the Latin Quarter and there is a good chance the answer will be: at the fountain. This one.

   It looks as if it has stood here forever, but it is only about thirty years older than the Eiffel Tower. Gabriel Davioud built it between 1858 and 1860, while Baron Haussmann was slicing his new boulevards through the medieval maze. The Boulevard Saint-Michel ended against an ugly blank wall of houses, so Davioud simply dressed the wall up as a triumphal arch with a waterfall. He used marbles and stones of different colours, red, green, cream, and set two winged dragons spitting water at the bottom. The archangel himself is by the sculptor Francisque Duret.

   Now look low, near the edge of the basin, for small plaques. They carry the names of young men killed around this square in August 1944, when the Resistance rose against the German garrison in the days before the liberation of Paris. Barricades went up across these streets, and the fountain stood in the middle of the shooting.

   And it happened again, in a very different way, in May 1968. Students tore up the paving stones of the Boulevard Saint-Michel to hurl at the riot police, and someone wrote the most famous slogan of that spring on a wall: under the paving stones, the beach. Soon afterwards, the city covered many of these streets in asphalt, which is much harder to throw.

   And why the Latin Quarter? For six hundred years the students who crowded these lanes spoke Latin, in lectures, in lodgings, in taverns. A boy from Oxford, Bologna or Prague could arrive here and be understood by everyone. The language left long ago... the name stayed. Now cross the square, with the Seine on your left, and slip into the narrow Rue de la Huchette, heading east.

2. 2. Rue de la Huchette & Saint-Séverin: The Stone Palm Tree

   3 Rue des Prêtres Saint-Séverin, 75005 Paris, France

   Walk down Rue de la Huchette, through the smell of grilled meat and the shouts of waiters, and keep an eye on the house numbers. At number 23 there is a tiny theatre, barely bigger than a living room. Since 1957 it has played the same two plays by Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson, almost every night, one of the longest unbroken runs of any theatre in the world.

   On your left, just off the street, look for a gap between the houses so narrow you could almost touch both walls. That is the Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, the street of the fishing cat, often called the narrowest street in Paris, at under two metres wide. Nobody agrees on the cat. The best story is of a black cat that fished in the Seine, back when the river lapped at the end of the lane.

   Now turn up toward the church of Saint-Séverin, with its gargoyles leaning out over the street. It was rebuilt in the fifteenth century in the Flamboyant style, the last firework of French Gothic. Go inside if you can and walk behind the altar: there, in the double ambulatory, one pillar spirals upward like a twisted palm trunk, its ribs fanning out across the vault. And the windows around it are not medieval at all. They were designed in the 1960s by the abstract painter Jean Bazaine, a storm of colour inside a Gothic forest.

   Beside the church lies a little garden enclosed by an old gallery. It was a charnel house, where bones from the overcrowded cemetery were stacked under the roof. The story goes that in 1474, in this cemetery, surgeons performed one of the first recorded operations for kidney stones, on a condemned archer, with the king's permission. He is said to have survived, and to have been pardoned.

   Look up, too, at the bell tower: one of its bells was cast in 1412, and is said to be the oldest in Paris. Now continue a few steps east to Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and a small garden facing the river, where something very old is leaning on a crutch.

3. 3. Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre & the Oldest Tree in Paris

   Square René-Viviani, 2 Rue du Fouarre, 75005 Paris, France

   Step into the little garden and find the tree that looks as if it is about to fall over. Its trunk leans hard toward the river, its bark is deeply furrowed, and it is propped up by grey supports like an old man on crutches. This robinia, a false acacia, is generally held to be the oldest tree in Paris. It was planted around 1601.

   The man who planted it was Jean Robin, gardener and botanist to King Henri the Fourth. Seeds of this American tree had reached him from across the Atlantic, and the whole species was later named Robinia in his honour. So every acacia-like robinia you see in parks across Europe owes its name to this neighbourhood. The old tree has survived wars and storms, and it still puts out leaves every spring.

   Now turn around. The squat little church behind you is Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, begun around 1165, so it is almost exactly as old as Notre-Dame, whose towers rise just across the river. For centuries the University of Paris held its assemblies here and elected its rector inside. In 1524 the students rioted during an election and smashed up the church so thoroughly that the university was banned from meeting here ever again.

   Go inside if the door is open, and you will be surprised. Instead of a Gothic altar you will find a wooden screen of golden icons, an iconostasis. Since 1889 this has been the church of the Melkite Greek Catholics, Arabic-speaking Christians from the Middle East who follow the Byzantine rite while in communion with Rome. Some evenings it fills with chamber music.

   One more ghost lives in the next street, Rue du Fouarre, the street of straw. Medieval students sat on bundles of straw on the floor to hear their masters, and Dante named this very street in his Paradise. Whether he ever studied here is a legend nobody can prove. Look across the water at Notre-Dame, reopened in December 2024 after the fire, then head up Rue Galande and across the Rue Saint-Jacques toward a palace built on Roman ruins.

4. 4. Musée de Cluny: Roman Baths and the Lady and the Unicorn

   28 Rue du Sommerard, 75005 Paris, France

   Stop at the railings on the Boulevard Saint-Michel side and look down at the ruins sunk below street level: thick walls of brick and rough stone, arches, a few stubborn trees. These are the remains of the public baths of Lutetia, the Roman town that became Paris, built around the year 200.

   Inside the museum, one room survived almost whole: the frigidarium, the cold bath. Its vault still rises about fourteen metres above the floor, the way it did when Roman bathers splashed in the cold pool. In the same room stands the Pillar of the Boatmen, carved blocks dedicated to Jupiter by the guild of river boatmen under the emperor Tiberius. It was dug up in 1711 beneath the choir of Notre-Dame, and it is the oldest sculpted monument in Paris.

   On top of the Roman walls, at the end of the fifteenth century, the abbots of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny built themselves a town house, with turrets, a chapel and a courtyard that is one of the finest late-medieval residences left in the city. In 1515 it lodged Mary Tudor, the young English widow of King Louis the Twelfth. Legend says she secretly married her true love, the Duke of Suffolk, inside these walls, and that the new king, Francis the First, preferred to let them go home rather than see her married to a foreign prince.

   But the real treasure upstairs is a set of six tapestries woven around 1500, The Lady and the Unicorn. In five of them, a lady and a gentle unicorn illustrate the five senses. The sixth carries a mysterious phrase above a tent: to my only desire. Nobody knows what it means. In 1841 the writer Prosper Mérimée found them rotting in a castle in central France, George Sand wrote about them, and in 1882 the state bought them.

   The museum, recently renovated, is officially the National Museum of the Middle Ages. From the courtyard, walk up Rue de la Sorbonne, the quiet street climbing the hill to your south, toward the most famous university in France.

5. 5. La Sorbonne: Robert de Sorbon's College and the Cardinal's Chapel

   Place de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, France

   Stand in the little square with its fountains and café tables and look at the dome at the end, grey and solemn above a Roman temple front. Behind it stretches the Sorbonne, a name that for most of the world simply means the University of Paris.

   It began very modestly. In 1257 a priest called Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to King Louis the Ninth, founded a college where poor students of theology could live and study without paying. He came from a village in the Ardennes, and his name ended up on the most prestigious academic brand in Europe. In 1470, three German printers set up a press inside the college, and the first book ever printed in France came off it here.

   Its theologians were powerful, and not always on the right side. The University of Paris backed the trial that condemned Joan of Arc in 1431, and for centuries the Sorbonne's doctors acted as censors of books they considered dangerous. The dome in front of you belongs to the chapel rebuilt by Cardinal Richelieu, who was the college's protector. His marble tomb is inside. During the Revolution it was broken open, and his embalmed head was carried off by a looter. It passed from hand to hand for decades before it was finally laid back in the tomb.

   In 1906 the Sorbonne gave its first lecture by a woman professor: Marie Curie, taking over the chair of her husband Pierre, who had just been killed by a horse-drawn cart. Hold on to her name, she will be waiting for you at the next stop. Across Rue Saint-Jacques, the Collège de France, founded by Francis the First in 1530, still gives free lectures with no exams and no diplomas to anyone who walks in.

   And in May 1968, police entered the courtyard and arrested students, and within days the Latin Quarter was in open revolt. The occupied Sorbonne became a non-stop debate club with posters on every wall. Now head up to Rue Soufflot and follow it uphill toward the colossal dome you can already see at the top.

6. 6. The Panthéon: Pendulum, Crypt and the Nation's Great

   Place du Panthéon, 75005 Paris, France

   Stop on the square at the top of the hill and tilt your head all the way back. Huge columns, a triangular pediment, and above it a dome that dominates the whole Left Bank. Across the front, in gold letters, the inscription reads: to great men, the grateful homeland.

   It was never meant to be a tomb. In 1744 King Louis the Fifteenth fell gravely ill and vowed that if he recovered, he would build a magnificent church to Sainte-Geneviève, patron saint of Paris. He recovered. The architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot spent the rest of his life on it and died in 1780 before it was finished. It was completed just in time for the Revolution, which in 1791 turned it into a temple for the heroes of the nation and bricked up its windows to make it more solemn.

   Voltaire was carried in that same year, Rousseau in 1794, and the two old enemies now lie almost face to face in the crypt. In 1885 Victor Hugo's coffin lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe before being brought here, and some two million people followed it. In 1995 Marie Curie became the first woman buried here for her own achievements. And in November 2021 Joséphine Baker, singer, Resistance agent and civil-rights campaigner, became the first Black woman honoured here, though her body remains in Monaco.

   Inside, look for the long wire falling from the dome. In 1851 the physicist Léon Foucault hung a heavy ball from a wire sixty-seven metres long here, set it swinging, and invited Paris to watch. Hour after hour the swing seemed to rotate slowly around the floor. The pendulum was not turning... the Earth was turning beneath it. For the first time, ordinary people could see the planet move with their own eyes.

   Soufflot's dome was so heavy that cracks soon appeared, and engineers have been reinforcing it ever since. Now walk to the left-hand corner of the Panthéon, behind it, where an older and much stranger church stands almost shoulder to shoulder with it.

7. 7. Saint-Étienne-du-Mont: Pascal, Racine and the Midnight Steps

   Place Sainte-Geneviève, 75005 Paris, France

   Look at this church's facade and try to decide what century it belongs to. A Gothic rose window, Renaissance columns, a triangular pediment stacked on top, and a slim bell tower squeezed in on the side. It took more than a hundred and thirty years to build, from 1494 to the 1620s, and you can see every change of fashion along the way.

   Inside is something no other church in Paris still has: a rood screen, a jubé. It is a stone bridge across the nave, carved like lace, with two spiral staircases curling up either side. Rood screens once separated clergy from congregation in every great church, and nearly all of them were torn down. This one, from the sixteenth century, survived.

   Here too lies what remains of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint who, the story goes, kept Attila the Hun away from Paris with her prayers in 451. Revolutionaries burned her relics in 1793; only fragments survived, and they are venerated in a shrine here. Two giants of French thought are buried in this church as well: the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, and the playwright Jean Racine. And in January 1857, the Archbishop of Paris was stabbed to death inside, during a service, by a priest who had been suspended from his duties.

   Now walk around to the side of the church, on Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, and find a few worn steps by a side door. In Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris, from 2011, the hero sits right here as the bells strike twelve, and an old car pulls up full of revellers who carry him off to the Paris of the 1920s, to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Picasso. People come every night to sit on the same steps and wait.

   No car, no Hemingway? Then go and find him yourself. Walk down Rue Descartes, southward, a few minutes, to a little square with a fountain where the real young Hemingway lived, poor and happy.

8. 8. Place de la Contrescarpe & Rue Mouffetard: Hemingway's First Paris

   Place de la Contrescarpe, 75005 Paris, France

   Find a spot by the fountain in the middle of this little round square, with its café terraces and its plane trees, and listen. On weekend mornings Rue Mouffetard, sloping away to the south, fills with market stalls, cheese, oysters, accordion music. It feels like a village... and that is exactly how a young American writer described it a hundred years ago.

   Walk a few steps into Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, the street running north from the square, to number 74. In January 1922 Ernest Hemingway, twenty-two years old and almost unknown, moved in here with his first wife, Hadley. Two small rooms, no hot water, a toilet on the landing and a dance hall downstairs. He rented a separate room to write in, around the corner at 39 Rue Descartes, in the very building where the poet Paul Verlaine had died in 1896. Decades later, in A Moveable Feast, he wrote that they were very poor and very happy.

   A few doors down the same street, at number 71, James Joyce was lent a flat in 1921 by the writer Valery Larbaud, and there he finished Ulysses. So within a stone's throw of this fountain, one man was learning to write short, clean sentences, while the other was completing the most sprawling novel of the century.

   The square itself has older ghosts. Tradition says a tavern here, the Pine Cone, welcomed Rabelais and the poets of the Pléiade in the sixteenth century. And the name Contrescarpe comes from the outer slope of the ditch that ran along the city wall of Philippe Auguste, which passed right here around 1200.

   Rue Mouffetard is older still. It follows the line of the Roman road that left Lutetia for the south, toward Italy. Its strange name probably comes from the stench rising from the tanneries and dyers along the little river Bièvre below. From the square, take little Rue Rollin and its stone stairs down to Rue Monge, where a hidden Roman arena is waiting.

9. 9. Arènes de Lutèce: The Forgotten Roman Amphitheatre

   49 Rue Monge, 75005 Paris, France

   Walk through the short passage and suddenly the city drops away: a sandy oval ringed by tiers of stone seats, with trees on top and old men playing pétanque in the middle. Children kick a ball where gladiators once fought. You are standing in the oldest monument in Paris that you can still use.

   This amphitheatre was built in the first century, when Paris was a modest Roman town called Lutetia. It could seat around fifteen thousand people, maybe more than the town's whole population, which tells you crowds came in from the countryside for the shows. It was a hybrid: an arena for animal fights and gladiators, but with a real stage on one side, so plays and pantomimes could be performed too. Look for the niches in the wall near the stage, possibly for statues, or for beasts waiting to be released.

   When barbarian raids shook Gaul in the third century, the people of Lutetia retreated to the island in the Seine and fortified it. The arena was abandoned, and its stones were carried off to build the new walls. Over the centuries it vanished completely under earth, vineyards and houses. Even its name survived only as a vague memory in old maps.

   Then in 1869, workers cutting the new Rue Monge struck the stone tiers. A bus company wanted the land for a depot, and half the arena was destroyed before anyone stopped them. Victor Hugo, old and furious, joined a campaign of writers and historians to save what was left. They won. More of the arena turned up when a convent was demolished in the 1880s, and in 1896 it opened as a public square.

   So what you see is half original stone and half careful reconstruction, and nobody minds. On sunny afternoons the tiers are full of students with sandwiches, just as Roman spectators once sat here with their snacks. Leave by the Rue de Navarre gate, cross Rue Lacépède and keep heading south through the quiet streets, toward a white minaret rising above the rooftops.

10. 10. Grande Mosquée de Paris: The Minaret and the Wartime Secret

    2bis Place du Puits de l'Ermite, 75005 Paris, France

    Stand in the little square and look up at the square white minaret, edged in green tiles, rising above a wall of whitewashed plaster. If you did not know better, you would think you had stepped into a street in Fez. That is no accident: Moroccan craftsmen carved the plaster, cut the tiles and shaped the cedar wood of this mosque.

    The Grande Mosquée de Paris was born out of the First World War. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from North and West Africa fought for France, and tens of thousands of Muslims among them were killed. In gratitude, the French state funded a mosque in the heart of the capital. The first stone was laid in 1922, and it was inaugurated in July 1926 by the French president and the Sultan of Morocco. It is the oldest mosque still standing in mainland France.

    Its first rector was Si Kaddour Benghabrit, an Algerian-born diplomat, polyglot and lover of music. When Paris was occupied in 1940, the mosque found itself at the centre of a quiet, dangerous story. According to testimonies gathered after the war, the mosque sheltered people hunted by the occupiers, Resistance members and some Jewish men, women and children, sometimes by giving them papers that described them as Muslims.

    Historians still debate how many were saved, because nobody kept records of such things, and the numbers told later vary enormously. The best-known story concerns the Algerian-Jewish singer Salim Halali, whom Benghabrit is said to have protected by having a false family name engraved on a tomb in a Muslim cemetery. What is certain is that, under the noses of the occupiers, this place chose to protect rather than denounce.

    Today the mosque is also part of everyday Paris: a garden courtyard with fountains, a tea room where people drink sweet mint tea under the fig trees, and a hammam. Visitors who are not Muslim may tour the courtyards outside prayer times. When you leave, cross Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire and enter the gates of the great garden opposite, then bear left and climb the little wooded hill.

11. 11. Jardin des Plantes: Buffon's Gloriette and the Cedar in the Hat

    Jardin des Plantes, 57 Rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France

    Climb the spiral path through the little maze of hedges until you reach the top of the hill, and you will find a small iron pavilion like a lace parasol. This is the Gloriette de Buffon, finished in the 1780s, and it is often called the oldest metal structure in Paris. From here, through the trees, the rooftops of the Latin Quarter spread out below you.

    The garden began as a pharmacy. In 1635 King Louis the Thirteenth allowed his physicians to create a royal garden of medicinal plants, and in 1640 it opened to the public, one of the first gardens in Paris where anyone could walk in. Botanists came here to teach in French rather than Latin, which made the learned doctors of the Faculty of Medicine absolutely furious.

    Its golden age came under the Count of Buffon, who ran the garden for almost fifty years, from 1739 until his death in 1788. He doubled its size, filled it with collections from all over the world, and wrote a natural history of the whole living world that ran to dozens of volumes. He even dared to suggest the Earth was far older than the Bible allowed, which got him into trouble with the theologians of the Sorbonne.

    On the way down the hill, look for a great cedar of Lebanon with spreading, flat branches. It was planted in 1734 by the botanist Bernard de Jussieu. The legend says he carried the seedling all the way from England in his hat, watering it with his own drinking ration on the crossing. It is probably not true... but nobody in Paris would ever tell it any other way.

    In 1793 the Revolution turned the royal garden into the National Museum of Natural History, with twelve professors instead of one royal steward, and scholars like Lamarck and Cuvier working within a few steps of each other. Some of the great ideas about how species change over time were argued out under these trees. Now walk down the hill and head north-east through the garden, past the old houses of the professors, toward the low pavilions and cages of the menagerie.

12. 12. The Ménagerie and the Great Glasshouses: Zarafa, Rilke's Panther and the End of the Walk

    Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, 57 Rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France

    Follow the paths among the little brick pavilions and wire enclosures, where red pandas doze in the branches and orangutans watch you through the glass with an expression of polite pity. It feels like a village zoo. In fact it is one of the oldest zoos in the world still open, founded in 1794.

    Its birth was pure Revolution. The king's menagerie at Versailles had been abandoned, and its few surviving animals were brought here. Then the Paris police seized the bears, monkeys and big cats of travelling showmen who exhibited them in the streets, and delivered them to the botanists, who suddenly found themselves zookeepers. The writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, author of the bestselling romance Paul and Virginia, had run the garden just before and argued hard for a public menagerie.

    In 1827 the most famous guest arrived. Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, sent King Charles the Tenth a young giraffe, the first ever seen in France. She landed in Marseille, and since no cart could carry her, she walked to Paris, some nine hundred kilometres, escorted by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Paris lost its mind. Women wore their hair piled up high, à la girafe, and giraffe-patterned wallpaper and porcelain filled the shops. Zarafa, as she was later called, lived here for about eighteen years.

    Around 1902, a young Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, came here on the advice of his master Rodin, who told him to go and really look at things. He stood in front of a panther pacing behind its bars, and wrote one of the most famous poems in the German language, The Panther: a creature for whom the world has become a thousand bars, and behind them, no world at all. Every caged animal here has had to live with that poem ever since.

    On your way out, look south at the great glasshouses, built in the 1830s, among the first large iron-and-glass greenhouses in the world, still steaming with tropical forest. And so the walk that began with a bronze archangel ends with a giraffe and a poet. Between the Roman arena and these cages lie two thousand years of Paris, and you have crossed them on foot in a single afternoon. The Seine is just beyond the gates... take your time.