Paris Quiz
Paris was rebuilt almost from scratch in less than twenty years during the nineteenth century.
A Paris quiz with answers for people who think they know the city. It leaves the obvious questions aside and asks about districts, bridges, station entrances and a small marker that most tourists never notice.
Did you know?
- A popular story claims the Louvre pyramid contains exactly 666 panes of glass. The museum has counted them: there are 673, made of 603 diamond shapes and 70 triangles. The glass was specially developed to be completely clear, without the faint green tint of ordinary glazing.
- The dark green drinking fountains seen on many Paris pavements were a gift. An English art collector, Richard Wallace, paid for them in 1872, after a period when clean water had become scarce and expensive. Around a hundred still work and supply free drinking water.
- The second-hand booksellers along the Seine keep their stock in about nine hundred green boxes fixed to the river walls, stretching for some three kilometres. The trade is centuries old, and city rules still set the size and colour of every box.
How Paris got its shape
Paris began more than two thousand years ago as a settlement of a Celtic people, the Parisii, on an island in the River Seine. The Romans called the town Lutetia. For centuries it grew outwards in rings, each marked by a new city wall, and the line of those walls can still be traced in the curving boulevards of today. The island is still the heart of the city, and the cathedral on it reopened in 2024 after a major restoration.
The great rebuilding
The wide, straight avenues that visitors think of as typically Parisian are younger than they look. From 1853 an official named Haussmann demolished thousands of medieval houses and narrow lanes and laid out broad streets, parks, sewers and uniform stone apartment blocks with iron balconies. The rules he set for building heights and façades are the reason the centre of the city looks so consistent.
A city of museums
The Louvre was a royal palace before it became a museum in 1793, and it is now the most visited museum in the world. Across the river, a grand railway station built in 1900 was converted in the 1980s into a museum of nineteenth-century art, with its giant station clocks still in place. Smaller museums fill former mansions, studios and even the old sewers.
Life along the river
The banks of the Seine in the centre of Paris are a World Heritage Site. Thirty-seven bridges cross the river within the city. In summer, stretches of the riverside roads are closed to traffic and turned into promenades with deckchairs and sand. In 2024 the river itself became the stage for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, with athletes travelling by boat. Houseboats are moored along the quays, and some have been homes for generations.