Places mawdsleyem Wants to Go

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

Paris' fabled purveyor of exotic taxidermy and natural history curios.

The first green space constructed on an elevated viaduct.

The subterranean "lake" below the Paris opera house inspired the Phantom of the Opera's lair.

This Parisian fountain is a little bit fantasy and a little bit nightclub.

The water-powered carriages are long gone, but for over a century this funicular railway has been the fastest route to the highest point in Paris.

Known as the "Dodo Manège," this carousel features a herd of animals that have disappeared—or may be gone soon.

Statue of death tucked in the University of Medicine courtyard.

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

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

Exquisite wall sculptures carved in secret by an early quarryman in an obscure corner of the Paris Catacombs.

A Parisian cemetery where the elite and artistic are interred beneath an eccentric collection of tombs.

A mechanized clock where a man fights off a dragon, crab, and rooster.

Down a cobblestone alleyway is a museum dedicated to Romanticism, with a secret garden.

Egyptian Revival movie palace abandoned for decades and restored in 2013.

Indents in the pavement are all that remain from a grisly death machine in Paris.

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

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

Site of a classic 19th-century physics experiment to prove the earth is rotating.

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

This Parisian café sticks almost exclusively to an ethos of reuse.

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

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

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.