Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
art and history |
| Disadvantages: |
- |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
Paris is the city I think I better know as I have been there for seven summers when I was young (from the age of 12 till 18) living in the house of my uncle and auntie. Then I retuned there, for business or pleasure, at least 300 times. And I still go to Paris 6 times a year, at least.
Despite of this fact, 10 years ago I got embarrassed when I made a mistake giving a direction.
I was in Paris with my family and the one of my brother in law for sightseeing. My nice expressed the wish to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. She told me about a cemetery where many famous personalities have been buried. Without hesitation I took everybody of our group to the cemetery in Montmartre where I have been some years before and where I discovered graves of famous poets and writers.
We arrived there and we started going around, looking for the Jim Morrison grave. We saw hundreds graves but not one was the one we were looking for. An hour later I decided to ask information. I approached one guardian and finally I understood how wrong I was. He told me that in Paris there are more than twenty cemeteries and that we were in the wrong one. The guardian wrote down, on a piece of paper, the right name and direction how to reach it. We took three different lines of the "Metro", then we walked for little more than 10 minutes and we were there, at the main gate of the "Père Lachaise".
Pointless say that from that moment and on everything went smooth. We just followed a group of hippies and in 10 minutes we were at Jim Morrison grave.
I think that all of you know who Jim Morrison was; know about the Doors and their songs that have been a milestone of the international music.
But today I don't want to write about the singer and its songs. I would like to write about the "Père Lachaise" cemetery, a site full of arts and history.
I think you know that Paris, like Rome, lays over seven hills, and this cemetery is on the hill called Champ Evêque.
During the 17th century the Jesuits bought the house of one rich merchant and then they turned it in a convent for their congregation.
Father François de La Chaise d'Aix , known as "Le Père La Chaise", was the confessor of the king Louis the 14th . The king visited the convent in 1652 and granted many benefits allowing an huge expansion of the building.
But the French Revolution, before, and the Napoleon Empire, later, led the complete destruction of the convent and the linked buildings. The land became property of Municipality of Paris that decided to use the area as new cemetery that officially opened in 1804.
The first grave of the new cemetery was belong to an office boy of the nearby police station.
As the Paris inhabitants were reluctant to choose this cemetery as their final "house", the Municipality decided to move here the graves of important personalities like the short story write La Fontaine and the comedy writer Molière. Then in 1817 they moved also the famous monument dedicated to the lovers Abelard and Héloise.
Along the east wall we can see the "Mur des Fédérés". Here, on 28 May 1871, 147 Communal were shot by French soldiers after they have been seized the night before during a battle inside the cemetery. The Communal were buried exactly where they fallen hit by the bullets of the firing squad.
As I said before in the "Père Lachaise" cemetery there are the graves of many important and famous personalities, from France as well as from foreign countries. (see a short list at the bottom of this review)
The graves could be a simple stone stele or an huge marble monument. But each one gives us an hint of the past time, an hint of a person.
This is a site of peace and sadness but also a place of art and history.
A visit requires at least half day, but I suggest you to stay as long as possible. Go around, watch the monuments and the statues, read the names and the inscriptions on the tombstones. Learn about a person, simple or famous.
Finally, a destination to include in your visit to Paris.
Guillaume Apollinaire, poet
François Arago, physicist and astronomer
Honoré de Balzac, writer
Paul Barras, politician
Beaumarchais (Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais), dramatist
Vincenzo Bellini, composer
J. Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, writer
Sarah Bernhardt, actress
Fulgence Bienvenüe, maker of Paris Metro (underground)
Georges Bizet, composer
Louis Blanc, historian and politician
Pierre Brasseur, moving director
Jean-François; Champollion, Egyptolist
Luigi Cherubini, musician
Frédéric Chopin, musician
Jean-Baptiste Clément, composer
Colette, writer
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, painter
Georges Courteline, dramatist
Alphonse Daudet, writer
Jacques Louis David, painter
Pierre David d'Angers, sculptor
Eugène Delacroix, painter
Pierre Desproges, humorist
Juliette Dodu, war hero
Yves du Manoir, airman and rugby player
Paul Éluard, poet
Fabien (le colonel), partisan
Louis Gay-Lussac, physicist and chemist
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, naturalist
Christian Hahnemann, inventor of homeopathy
Georges Haussmann, prefect of Seine district
Héloise & Abélard, lovers
Dominique Ingres, painter
François Christian Kellermann, army general
Jean de la Fontaine, short story writer
Pierre Lazareff, journalist
Ferdinand de Lesseps, diplomatist
Georges Méliès, movie director
Amedeo Modigliani, painter
Molière, dramatist
Silvia Monfort, actress
Gaspard Monge, mathematician
Yves Montand, singer and actor
Jim Morrison, singer
Joachim Murat, army general
Paul Panhard, tycoon
Antoine Parmentier, agronomist
Édith Piaf, singer
Marcel Proust, writer
Gioacchino Rossini, musician
James de Rothschild, banker
L'abbé Sieyès, politician
Oscar Wilde, writer
Visit http://www.gargl.net/lachaise/carte/carte.htm to see the map of the cemetery with the location of the graves.
P.S. Just for your information, the today cost for a 2 square meter grave is about £ 3,500, monument not included.
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