Places mdesilva Wants to Go

Natural history museum celebrating biodiversity with a parade of taxidermy animals.

How did a French journalist’s grave become the sexiest statue in the cemetery?

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

A favorite Paris bar for U.S. expats, including Gershwin, Hemingway, and James Bond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A grotto-like lodge decorated with gilded mosaics, rocks and a noisy waterfall was the setting for the most sumptuous pleasure house of 1900s Europe.

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

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

Medieval museum built over Roman baths that features famous tapestries of a lady and a unicorn.

Inside a former cabaret, seven floors of erotic art.

Statue of death tucked in the University of Medicine courtyard.

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

A surrealist timepiece by the artist of melting clocks.

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

Behind the pink curtain, Au Bonheur du Jour, an art gallery of erotic archives.

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.

"In the Dark" Restaurant in Paris offers dinner in complete darkness.