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.
My last blog post dealt with copyrighted material and my search for images I could not find. I mentioned a couple of people and I thought I’d like to expand on them. Before I do, let’s set the stage in the mid-1800s in Paris under the rule of Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon).
London was forced to rid itself of its medieval trappings in 1666. The Great Fire of London created the opportunity for the city to rebuild and become more contemporary. It took Paris almost 200-years to catch up but it wasn’t a fire that provided the catalyst.
