Paris & Surroundings

Urban planners in the French capital don't spend all their time imagining how to refurbish old buildings. There's also new, innovated work on the drawing board, including 23 projects that have just been given the green light by the mayor of Paris.

Now that you’ve mastered exchanges with waiters, bar talk, conversation at dinner parties and viewing French movies without subtitles, are you ready to take the leap to French theater? Consider Corneille's Le Cid, Molière's Dom Juan and Hugo's Les Misérables at Vingtième Théâtre in Paris’s 20th arrondissement from January 14 to March 6, 2016.

In a startling and macabre discovery, archeologists in Paris discovered this week what appears to be a mass bicycle graveyard on the site of a portion of Canal Saint Martin in the 10th arrondissement. The City of Paris gave France Revisited special access to photograph and report on the extraordinary find.

The year 2015 ends on a bright and hopeful day in Paris. I’m relieved to feel no compulsion to come up with resolutions for 2016; I can simply reuse those of 2015 since none of them was realized. Something about this makes me happy.

On a bright December morning I was headed across the footbridge the Pont des Arts to the Institut de France to learn about the 350th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences and about Louis Pasteur's archives, recently listed in the Memory of the World Register.

The perfect Paris and France travel gift for your friends and loved ones--or for yourself--suffering from Paris-envy, Francophilia and a frequent desire to travel to France: Travel therapy with Gary Lee Kraut, editor of France Revisited.

Fluctuat nec mergitur, the motto that appears on the heraldry or coat of arms of the City of Paris, came to the forefront as Parisians and others began to rally around slogans in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015. This is the occasion to recall the history of the city’s heraldry and the significance of the elements that make up the city’s coat of arms.

The terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13 killed 130 people and left hundreds more wounded. The immediate target was joie de vivre in the City of Light: the pleasure of sharing a drink or a meal with friends, of listening to music, of strolling down the street, of kissing on the sidewalk, of men and women mingling and dressing freely, of gathering comfortably with strangers, of being young in years or young at heart, of openly celebrating life. Those are all things that you, the visitor and the return traveler, look forward to when you imagine (re)visiting Paris.

Those who live in Paris know that it isn't all about fine dining but about dining with fine friends. Here's a selection of 10 restaurants and other eateries throughout Paris for when you want to keep it simple, simply good.