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The 1st of May is the Labour Day in France. No one work except the lily of the valley sellers in the streets. Traditionnaly, people give a twig of lily to their relatives to bring some luck.
9 comments April 30th, 2006
Peugot built this model, the 301 between 1932 and 1937. About 65.000 301 have been sold. The maximum speed was 100 km/h, 70 Mph.
The plate on this car shows a modern scheme with three letters. The original plates, at least before the 40s, had only one or two letters.
The last two numbers show the departement (french district) where the car is coming from. There are 96 districts in metropolitan France. These numbers give endless possibilities of games for the kids on the backseat.
3 comments April 30th, 2006
“The many-sided history of a peculiar scene, from its emergence at the beginning of the 1960s up until 1985. Over sixty artists, on a path which deals with topics such as the search involved in the art of assemblage, Pop art, Californian minimalism, conceptual art, performance, installations, video and experimental film”.
2 comments April 22nd, 2006
In the main courtyard of the Musée Carnavalet, you can’t miss this statue of Louis XIV, the sun king, dressed as a roman emperor and made by Coysevox. It’s an unusual place for this kind of statue. They never stand like that in the middle of the yard because the owner, at that time, didn’t want such a masterpiece to disturb attention of his visitors.
This Hôtel, in which the Paris’s history museum took place is a mix of different buildings from different times. Its construction ended in the last 19th century when Haussmann enlarged and restored it between 1871 and 1890 to store the historic collections of the City of Paris. Haussmann, who destroyed half of Paris to draw main streets we know todays, was aware of his action. He tried to collect historic pieces and incorporated them in this Hôtel Carnavalet.
You can find the arch of rue de Nazareth (15th century) coming from the Ile de la Cité, the staircase from the Hôtel de Luynes and its painted background en trompe l’oeil and this statue of Louis XIV, who wasn’t set up in this place but at the Hôtel de Ville since july, 14th 1689.
During the french revolution, in 1789, all the king’s statues were destroyed except this one, made of bronze, forgotten in a backyard.
In 1830, Haussmann fetched the statue in the Hôtel Carnavalet.
Add comment April 16th, 2006
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This library, known as the “Trés Grande Bibliothèque” (Very Large Library) was built in 1996 in an industrial area of Paris by the river Seine. Four towers, shaped to recall four opened books were designed to house the Biblioth豵e Nationale de France collection of books and manuscripts. More than 10 millions of books are store behind these glasses, protected from the light by wooden boards. You can see in the glass reflection, on the left, the opposite tower (small side) and on the right the oppposite tower (long side of the rectangle). |
2 comments April 9th, 2006
Anita Ekberg is a swedish actress. She became famous for her role in the Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini in 1960. In this film she took a night bath in the fountain of Trevi in Roma, leaving me without voice for a few moment. Bob Hope joked that her parents had received the Nobel Prize for architecture.
I met her one more time on a poscard, in front of this book shop, Galerie Vivienne. She seemed to say to me “Don’t tell anyone about us”.
You can learn a lot about her here.
3 comments April 1st, 2006
 
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