Paris: One of the World's Great Walking Cities
Viewing the Venus de Milo or looking up at the 122-year-old wonder that is the Eiffel Tower count as the sort of snapshot moments one expects in Paris. Nobody can forget a tour of the Louvre, even if it's to recount how weird it is to see a crowd of 200-some tourists, bull-penned behind velvet ropes, snapping away at theMona Lisa with their cell phones like so many Fleet Street paparazzi.
Memorable Paris moments can come in more subtle forms, as did ours when we strolled into the Place de la Contrescarpe, an intimate square in the Latin Quarter that has the feel of a village commons, and stopped for a cafe creme. In the early morning, with only a few locals stirring, it had the feeling of the city coming awake: Shopkeepers hosing down their sidewalks, a man in a business suit standing up while downing his espresso at a cafe, an old woman pushing her shopping cart up the rue du Cardinal Lemoine.
Just down the street, on the cobblestoned rue Mouffetard, butchers, fishmongers and pastry chefs set out their wares in streetside displays, getting ready for another market day on a street that began as a Roman road.
We learn later that Ernest Hemingway's first Parisian apartment - a cold-water walk-up in those days - was just around the corner and that one of the square's inviting cafes played a role in his expatriate's memoir A Moveable Feast.
In one of the world's great walking cities, strolling the narrow, irregular streets of districts like this can be as notable as visiting Paris' more monumental quarters.
Although our list is up for debate and thoroughly incomplete, two sections of the city stood out as our favorites for exploring as strollers, or flaneurs, as the French say.
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