Places nealpwright Wants to Go

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

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

A mud statue stands in the dark tunnels, seeming to hold up the weight of the city above.

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

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

This surreal statue brings a famous French novel about a supernatural cad to arresting life.

This banal Parisian entranceway is not what it seems.

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

The narrowest street in Paris.

A unrivaled and rather horrifying collection of wax dermatological models.

Twelve grave-faced marble angels guard the emperor's tomb at Les Invalides.

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.

The first green space constructed on an elevated viaduct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A surrealist timepiece by the artist of melting clocks.