Places Bookhistorian Wants to Go

The industrial architecture honors the laborers who brought the Exposition Universelle of 1900 to life.

A 400-year-old church covered floor to ceiling in ex-voto offerings from the faithful.

An odd museum dedicated to French fakes.

The personal library of the founder of modern neurology is open to visitors.

A 16th-century fountain marks the site of a lost medieval cemetery once filled with mass graves.

Beggars were miraculously "cured" of their fake ailments when they returned home to this 17th century Paris slum each night.

This little-known relic crypt holds stolen parts of a Roman Empress.

The headless bodies of more than 1,300 guillotined victims of the Reign of Terror are buried here in mass graves.

A popular shrine where the Blessed Virgin allegedly appeared in 1830, displaying a holy armchair and two incorruptible remains of Lady Saints.

Pitié-Salpêtrière was the dumping grounds for women who received the dreaded diagnosis of "hysterical."

This former “ante-chamber to the guillotine” has been refurbished to illustrate the brutal history of French justice.

A unrivaled and rather horrifying collection of wax dermatological models.

The first green space constructed on an elevated viaduct.

An overlooked marble is the only surviving in-place 18th century example of the measurement that changed how we define distance.

In the best of all possible worlds, everyone will get a chance to see this statue in which Voltaire's heart is interred.

The ruins of a Duke's bucolic dream, where camels once roamed alongside "Dutch" windmills and faux-Italian vineyards.

This statue was given to France by the United States to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution.

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

A surrealist timepiece by the artist of melting clocks.

Walk upon the mementos of the dead in this Parisian courtyard paved with medieval tombstones.

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.

The oldest stone house in Paris was built by its most famous alchemist.

A plaque marks the house in Stockholm where the French philosopher René Descartes lived up until his death.

An ancient Viking runestone hidden in plain view in Stockholm's old town.