Walk the Latin Quarter,
your way.

The Latin Quarter is the oldest continuously inhabited neighbourhood in Paris. Before there was a Paris there was Lutetia - the Roman city built on this same Left Bank slope from around 50 BC. The forum sat where Boulevard Saint-Michel now runs; the thermes (thermal baths) survive in the basement of the Cluny museum; the amphitheatre - the Arènes de Lutèce - is still a partial bowl on Rue Monge, used for boules and lunchtime sandwiches by the people who live around it. When the Romans left, the hill stayed inhabited. When Sainte-Geneviève saved the city from Attila in 451 (legend has it), this is where she did it. The 5th arrondissement has been someone's home for two thousand years.

The medieval university

The University of Paris was founded around 1150 and the Sorbonne, its theology college, in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Saint Louis. Within fifty years the quarter around it was a student city - twenty thousand young men from across Europe, all speaking Latin (the lingua franca of medieval learning), all arguing in the lanes around the Place de la Sorbonne. That is where the name comes from: not Roman Latin but medieval scholastic Latin, the language you had to speak to be heard here.

The colleges multiplied. Collège de Navarre, Collège des Bernardins, Collège des Quatre-Nations, Collège de France (still here, on the corner of Place Marcelin Berthelot, still teaching open-to-the-public courses by appointment). The Sorbonne survived the Hundred Years War, the Wars of Religion, the Revolution. It was rebuilt by Richelieu in the 1630s; the chapel houses his tomb. It was closed during the Revolution and reopened by Napoleon. It absorbed all the medieval colleges. Today it is several universities at once - Sorbonne University, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Sciences Po nearby - but the name and the place persist.

The Panthéon, the secular church

Up the hill, on the highest point of the Left Bank, sits the Panthéon. It was originally a church - Sainte-Geneviève's church, in fact, replacing the medieval one. Louis XV commissioned it in 1755 from Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who took 36 years to finish it. By the time it was ready in 1790 the Revolution had begun, and the new National Assembly decided to convert it into a secular mausoleum for "great men". The phrase carved across the pediment - AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE ("To the great men, the grateful homeland") - stays.

Inside, in the crypt: Voltaire and Rousseau (the two original interments, in 1791), Victor Hugo (1885, his coffin drawn from the Arc de Triomphe by 2 million mourners), Émile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Pierre and Marie Curie (the first woman buried here in her own right), Jean Moulin, the Resistance fighters, Simone Veil and her husband Antoine, and as of 2024 the writer and Resistance hero Missak Manouchian. The pendulum hanging from the dome is the original Foucault's pendulum from 1851 - the first physical proof that the Earth rotates, swung from the dome in the same building, with the same wire, to be on display every day. The crypt is moving. The dome view (April-October) covers most of the Left Bank.

The medieval museum and the Roman city beneath

One block north-west of the Sorbonne is the Cluny - a museum housed in the 15th-century Hôtel de Cluny, which was itself built on top of the still-standing Roman thermes of Lutetia. You can see both periods in the same building: the medieval mansion, with its courtyard and turret, contains the medieval museum; the basement contains the Roman thermal baths, vast and intact, the largest in northern Gaul. The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries hang in a darkened circular room on the first floor - six panels, woven around 1500, each on a "sense" (taste, hearing, sight, smell, touch, and a sixth, mysterious "à mon seul désir"). They are the most-loved medieval objects in France.

The book quarter

The Sorbonne students needed books. From the 16th century the printers, binders and bookshops clustered on the Left Bank - and many are still working. Shakespeare and Company at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie (English-language, since 1951, on top of the original 1919 Sylvia Beach store), Gibert Joseph on Boulevard Saint-Michel (the city's biggest student bookshop), the second-hand stalls of the bouquinistes along the Seine quais (since the 17th century, now UNESCO-listed). The English-language Abbey Bookshop on Rue de la Parcheminerie, Albin Michel and Hachette nearby - the whole publishing trade still has its centre of gravity here.

Mouffetard, the market, the writers

Rue Mouffetard is one of the oldest streets in Paris - originally a Roman road south to Italy. Today it runs from Place de la Contrescarpe at the top down to the church of Saint-Médard at the bottom. The lower half is a working food market Tuesday-Sunday; the upper half a cluster of late-night student bars and crêpe stalls. Hemingway lived at 74 Rue Cardinal Lemoine just off the top, in 1922-23. He describes the Mouffetard market in A Moveable Feast with reluctant tenderness; he was broke, he was happy, he was writing his first novel. The Closerie des Lilas, the older café down at Port-Royal where he met Joyce, is still there.