Ile de la Cite
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Ile de la Cite is where Paris began. It was settled in around 300 BC by a Celtic tribe, the Parisii, and the town grew up was known as Lutetia Paris-iorum. In 52 BC it was overrun by Julius Caesar’s troops. A natural natural defensive site commanding a major east-west river trade route, it was an obvious candidate for a bright future – the Romans garrisoned it and laid out one of their standard military town plans. While they never attached any political importance to the town, they endowed it with an administrative centre, constructing a place-fortress that became the stronghold of the Merovingian kings in 508, then of the counts of Paris, who in 987 became kings of France.
The Frankish kings set about transforming the old Gallo-Roman fortress into a splendid palace, of which the Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie prison survive today. At the other end of the island, they erected the great cathedral of Notre-Dame. By the twelfth century the small Ile de la Cité teemed with life, somehow managing to accommodate twelve parishes, not to mention numerous chapels and monasteries. It was all too much for the monks at one of the monasteries, the Saint-Magloire ; finding the island too noisy, they moved out in 1138 to quieter premises on the right bank.
It takes some stretch of the imagination today to picture what this medieval city must have looked like, for nearly all of it was erased in the nineteenth century by Baron Haussmann, Napoléon III’s Préfet de la Seine (a post equivalent to mayor of Paris), displacing some 25,000 people and destroying ninety streets (which had, it has to be said, become squalid and notoriously dangerous at night). In their placed were raised four vast Neoclassical edifices, largely given over to housing the law and police. The few corners of the island that remain untouched by Haussmann include the square du Vert-Galant and place Dauphine, delightful havens of tranquility.
The cathedral, Conciergerie and Sainte-Chapelle inevitably attract large crowds and it’s not unusual to have to queue for entry. Things are generally a bit quieter if you visit early in the morning or late afternoon.
