Places ben Wants to Go

Twelve grave-faced marble angels guard the emperor's tomb at Les Invalides.

A majestic lion statue guards this Parisian botanical garden, and feeds on an unsettling item.

A counter-culture bookstore like no other hides in plain sight in the streets of Paris.

Skeletons, medical artifacts, and other obscure and precious treasures all displayed in a wooden pharmacist's cabinet.

An antique curios dealer and hybrid taxidermist.

A charming flea market shop dedicated to retrofuturistic apparati.

A series of abstract, silly sculptures represent the works of a great modern classical composer.

Notorious artist squat renovated into legal studios.

France's national museum of scientific and industrial instruments.

Teeming with illegal goods and services, this towering maze of vice is also a popular tourist accommodation.

An "inside out" building in the historical center of Paris, featuring Europe’s largest modern art museum.

A scandalous Art Nouveau collaboration that set Paris all atwitter at the turn of the 20th century.

A museum on the history of Paris, including a set of Napoleon's toiletries, Proust's room, and relics of the Revolution.

The macabre collection of Jacques Sirgent, an expert scholar on the undead and all of their trappings.

Stroll through retro Paris while shopping for old postcards and discarded doll heads.

High atop the Eiffel Tower is a small apartment built exclusively to entertain the science elite and make the rest of Paris jealous.

This Greek temple, open only an hour a day, was the site of a war of tastes between an architect and an artist.

Climb inside an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times its normal size.

The Devil’s own choice when he needs a drink in Brussels.

Lavish royal estate punctuated with heated greenhouses.

This museum houses an imposing skeleton army comprised of creatures great and small.

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.

The bomb-ravaged remains of of a colossal Neptune.

The skull of the patron saint of lovers lies in the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin—maybe.