Places Minisaurus Wants to Go

A Parisian exterminator's shop whose storefront displays stuffed rats hanging from traps.

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

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

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

This charming cobbled backstreet is the most Instagramable street in Paris, much to the residents' annoyance.

A subterranean shelter remains intact under a busy Paris railway station.

A unrivaled and rather horrifying collection of wax dermatological models.

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

The curious underground history of keeping Paris clean.

The largest medical and anatomical collection in France lies hidden from the public.

The history of radiation is on safe display at the foot of a radiation science laboratory.

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

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

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

Ghosts of France's colonial past.

Remains of Roman amphitheater hidden in a sleepy quarter of Paris.

This crumbling, graffiti-covered mansion sits tantalizingly within reach of the proletariat who frequent a public park.

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

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

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

Statue of death tucked in the University of Medicine courtyard.

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

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

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