A Walking Tour Paris

The beautiful Russian Orthodox St-Alexandre-Nevsky Cathedral was designed by members of the St Petersburg Fine Arts Academy in 1861 and was jointly financed by Tsar Alexander II and the local Russian community. It forms a traditional Greek-cross plan and has five golden-copper domes. The rich interior mosaics and frescoes are Byzantine in style, and a wall of icons divides the church in two, originally to separate the male from the female worshippers.

Retrace your steps back up rue Daru and turn right onto Boulevard de Courcelles, Parc Monceau will be on your left. This charming park was established by the Duc de Chartres in 1778. He was a committed anglophile and commissioned amateur landscape architect Louis Carmontelle to design an English-style garden for him. Carmontelle, who was also a theatre designer, created a ‘garden of dreams’ and filled it with architectural follies.

The Duc was guillotined during the Revolution and the garden passed into state hands. About a third of it was redeveloped for housing, but the remaining 8 hectares (20 acres) were sold to the City of Paris in 1860 when it was redesigned by Adolphe Alphand, the designer of the Bois de Boulogne, and turned into a public park the following year. The site of a brutal massacre during the Paris Commune, it is now a pleasant place to stroll in and contains a number of charming structures, including a naumachia, or Roman-style pond flanked by Corinthian columns. This is based on the ornamental pools that the Romans used for simulating naval battles. There is also a rotunda designed by Nicolas Ledoux, which used to be a tollhouse.