1. The devil’s in the details, or so they say, but I think that in Paris, the opposite may be true, especially when the weather is nice enough to enjoy them. I love, for example, the way that it appears as though this statue atop the Alexander III bridge seems as though she’s looking up the river, to take in the Eiffel Tower.
2. On the still-same bridge, my literary hero (Victor Hugo) seems to have signed his name, just above that of Pasteur and just below writer and politician Lamartine and painter Delacroix, whose work – most famously, Liberty Leading the People – can be found in the Louvre.
3. By the time they get here, most Louvre visitors are already heading downstairs towards the collections, but looking up from beneath the glass pyramid, the blue sky is cut into an abstract mosaic.
4. If you look down, meanwhile, you’ll sometimes encounter these golden medallions, which mark the Paris meridian, a long-standing rival to the Greenwich meridian for the world’s prime meridian (and a major element of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.) It runs through the city as well as through the Louvre itself; there’s one notably at the base of the staircase leading away from Winged Victory and towards the Venus de Milo.
5. A completely different (but no less eye-catching) gold circle can be found on the gates of the Ministry of Education, in the 5th arrondissement. I walk past it most days, while running tours in the neighborhood, but it shines particularly brightly now that the sun has finally graced Paris for spring.