Places Handsome Dan Wants to Go

Collection of antique taxidermy and natural specimens, near one of Paris's oldest flea markets.

What looks like a normal building is really a hollow facade hiding a subway vent.

Ordinary art transforms to extraordinary thanks to locals' quirky sense of humor.

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

An odd museum dedicated to French fakes.

The Sun King's military models, saved from the Louvre.

A museum which takes visitors to the côté obscure of Paris.

One of the oldest masonic museums in Paris.

Saintly bones pressed into a wax effigy of a Catholic superstar.

The oldest and smallest cemetery in Paris is only open to the public twice a year.

The spiral staircase hidden inside this giant Parisian column was likely built for Catherine de Medici's astrologer.

Dedicated to the art of hunting, with juxtapositions of contemporary art.

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

Got apples?

135 bronze medallions mark a French meridian line which once rivaled the hotshot Greenwich timeline.

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

Museum on French naval history, with magnificent figureheads, a historic diving suit, and a boat used by Napoleon.

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

This Paris art space celebrates the creativity and ingenuity that springs from abject poverty, especially in Africa.

The recovered bones of martyrs slaughtered during The Terror are on display in this church crypt.

This banal Parisian entranceway is not what it seems.

A lone cannonball remains lodged in the walls of the Hotel de Sens as a sober reminder of a revolution.

Where the high court feasted, frolicked, and high courtesans put their royal lovers' diamonds to the test.

Two awe-inspiring globes from the reign of the Sun King hang from the ceiling of France's national library.