9.4.11

Montmartre Day

Today we walked up the hill to the neighborhood known as Montmartre. It is a wonderful place where numerous famous people have lived and worked, like Pissarro, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and Langston Hughes, just to name a few. We went by the Moulin Rouge where Talouse-Lautrec loved painting the Can-Can dancers. We saw where Moliere's theater troupe performed. We wandered through steep, winding streets that were mobbed with crowds. There were street performers everywhere entertaining the crowds with music, dancing and even pretending to be statues. We also went to the Montmartre Cemetery. It is a beautiful place filled with history (for example Edgar Degas is one of the famous people buried there), but it is also a quiet retreat from the craziness of the surrounding neighborhood.

We did tour the Basilica Sacre-Coeur. It is gorgeous. We saw the main building, climbed to the dome and wandered down to the crypt, too. There is a wonderful statue of the headless Saint Denis, for whom Montmartre owes it's name. St. Denis was beheaded on the hill (mont) and was a martyr (martre). The legend tells that he was not distracted by losing his head and instead picked it up and walked on.

We had plans to have dinner and go see the movie Rango in French, but alas, we were set back when we realized we had lost Emma's sweater. Backtracking did lead us to the lost sweater but made us miss our movie. No worries, we will find other adventures.

1 comment:

  1. Rango en Francais - quelle bonne! Or something like that :-) Hope you guys are having fun today, too!

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