Paris

Paris is a capital you read on foot. The Seine splits it into a Left Bank of bookstalls and cafés and a Right Bank of grand boulevards, and the whole city fits inside a ring you could cross in an afternoon. Cream limestone facades, wrought-iron balconies and grey zinc roofs repeat street after street — the uniformity is deliberate, not an accident of age. Some twelve hundred bakeries work inside that ring, and bread is a daily errand rather than a weekly one. The monuments are what you come for, but the city runs on smaller habits. A café charges three prices for the same coffee — cheapest standing at the counter, dearer in the room, dearest on the terrace — and all three must be posted. Terraces stay busy long after the museums have shut.

Paris began as Lutetia, a Roman town built on an island in the Seine, its forum and baths laid out on the Left Bank in the first century. A Frankish king later made it a capital; by the Middle Ages the island held Notre-Dame and the royal court, while a university drew scholars to the slopes above. The city walled and rewalled itself as it grew. In 1789 a crowd stormed the Bastille prison, opening a revolution that ended the monarchy and reset the calendar of French life. In the 1850s and 1860s, under Napoleon III, the prefect Haussmann drove wide boulevards through the medieval tangle, giving Paris its uniform stone facades and long sightlines. The Belle Époque added the Eiffel Tower, the Métro and the department store. Two wars and a century of immigration reshaped who lives here. Today Paris is a working capital of roughly two million people inside the old ring, wrapped by a far larger metropolis. Few cities wear their whole history at street level so plainly, one century's stone set beside the next.

Three days covers the river, the great museums and one hilltop village of a neighborhood; five lets you slow down for a market morning, a garden afternoon and the quiet quarters most visitors never reach.