15 49.0138 8.38624 both 0 bullet 0 4000 1 0 horizontal https://www.messynessychic.com 300 4000

Category / Forget Paris

The Rotting Rothschild Mansion in Paris

The Rothschilds are known as one of the greatest European banking dynasties ever established, amassing the largest private fortune in modern history. The family is less well-known for anything to do with squalor, ruin or decay. But just 5 miles from the Notre-Dame, beyond the lush green lawn of the Edmond de Rothschild park, standing defiantly behind a thick wall of…

Reviving the Real-Life “Middle Earth” Maps in a Secret Paris Museum

Maps and Miniatures — these are a few of my favourite things (along with Paris and all its secret places, of course). But you might be wondering what secrets I could possibly find at one of the most recognisable landmarks in Paris, Les Invalides? So big you can’t miss it, built four centuries ago for the invalids…

Paris Has a Brutal(ist) Side

Love it or hate it, brutalist architecture has an unavoidable presence in every major metropolis– even Paris. In fact, the French capital is something of a haven for futurist concrete architecture. Brutalist boomed here during the 60s and 70s in response to Modernism’s utopian vision, and after Haussmann, came superstar architects like Le Corbusier and an…

Dinner at the Drive-Through Eiffel Tower

We’ve seen it dressed up every which way; painted yellow, used as a giant advertising billboard; and we even peered inside its hidden apartment, but we’ve never seen the Eiffel Tower looking quite like this. Ladies and gents, you’re looking at the 1936 Eiffel Tower that never was, a mock-up to turn Paris’ Iron Lady into……

Lost Paris: Documenting the Disappearance of a Medieval City

If you can’t make it to Paris (or time travel), the next best thing might just be these photographs of a Paris lost, moments before its disappearance. Before it became the city of light, before the Eiffel Tower became its unmistakable symbol, photographer Charles Marville was commissioned to document the transition from medieval Paris, a city that…

Whatever You Do, Don’t Tell the French About Tarrare

(A word of caution: this is not an article to read on your lunchbreak). He could wrap his empty stomach around his waist like a belt, and began eating his bodyweight in meat every day as a child. His lips were nearly non-existent, and his mouth was so wide, it could hold 12 eggs at…

A Lost Breed of Parisians

Without them, Paris would’ve stood still. They were immortalised in song by Serge Gainsbourg, and put into poetry by the cheeky Raymond Queneau. But by 1975, Paris’ metro ticket punchers, or poinçonneurs, were a dying breed. Their rise and fall traces the streamlining of the whole métropolitan system, which was inaugurated at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair to a crowd in…

Johnny Cash’s White Witch of Montego Bay

Where’s your husband Annie? Where’s number two and three? Are they sleeping neath the palms beside the Caribbean Sea? At night I hear you ridin’ and I hear your lovers call And still can feel your presence round the great house at Rose Hall… –Johnny Cash Something unsettling sleeps in the walls of Jamaica’s seductive Rose…

The Paris Time Capsule Apartment

A Parisian apartment left untouched for over 70 years was discovered in the quartier of Pigalle a few summers ago. The owner of this apartment, Mrs. De Florian left Paris just before the rumblings of World War II broke out in Europe. She closed up her shutters and left for the South of France, never…

200 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Go Down to the Basement in Paris

Underneath the product aisles of a well-known Monoprix supermarket branch in central Paris, where I’ve often popped into myself to pick up a bottle of wine and some olives before attending parties nearby, the skeletons of up to 200 lost souls have been discovered buried in a mass grave. For some of us reading of course, this may very…

NEWER POSTS 1 … 20 21 22 … 30 OLDER POSTS