I dare anyone to shout out a name of a major European city that wasn’t founded on or near a major river or waterway. London has the Thames. Budapest has the Danube. Rome has the Tiber. Paris has the Seine.
There are 37 bridges in Paris that cross the Seine. The Pont au Change is only one of them. It connects the Right Bank with the Île de la Cité. There have been numerous bridges on this site and records show that Caesar’s troops destroyed a bridge here in 50 BC.
I asked Dan Owen (our nephew and photographer) what our next blog post should be about. He said, “Don’t talk about any more dead people.”
I’m doing research for two books on Paris during times where people got their heads chopped off and were burned at the stake (among other agonizing events). So how could I NOT talk about more dead people?
We were on our way to the second district on our (translated: mine) prescheduled itinerary for the day when I abruptly got everyone off the Metro. We were so close to the Pont Neuf that I couldn’t resist. Sandy and I had never been down to the lower level of the point of the island (the extreme western side of the Île de la Cité). One of the attractions of going to the lower point is to see the real level of the island when the Romans began their colony.
