Description
The Luxembourg Gardens, Paris's "Luco", are a 23-hectare garden in the 6th arrondissement, the green heart of the Left Bank. They mix formal French lawns and alleys with the play of a neighborhood park, with the Luxembourg Palace on the north side.
Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV, wanted a piece of her native Florence in Paris. In 1612 she began a palace modeled on the Pitti, and around it a garden like those of her childhood, with 2,000 elms. Today the palace houses the French Senate, which owns the garden too.
The layout is a meeting of two worlds: a formal French parterre in the middle, with the Italian taste of Florence that Marie wanted to recreate around it. Children sailing model boats on the pond started a tradition that inspired similar ones elsewhere.
The center is the octagonal Grand Bassin, the pond of the model boats.
In the southwest corner there is an orchard of apple and pear trees, with beehives. The garden also has chess players, tennis courts, a puppet theatre and a vintage carousel, and free concerts in its gazebos.
There are just over a hundred statues, monuments and fountains: twenty queens and illustrious women of France around the central lawn, George Sand and Verlaine, and even a small model of Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty.
Don't miss the Medici Fountain, built in 1620 as a grotto, a nymphaeum, and moved in the 1860s. Auguste Ottin's sculptures show the giant Polyphemus spying on the lovers Acis and Galatea.
Later kings neglected the garden, the future Louis XVIII sold off a slice, and the Revolution enlarged it with the land of the Carthusian monks next door.
In Les Misérables, this is where Marius and Cosette first meet.
The garden has been shrinking and growing for four centuries. It began at eight hectares, reached thirty by 1630, and took its present size only after the post-Revolutionary changes.
Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV, wanted a piece of her native Florence in Paris. In 1612 she began a palace modeled on the Pitti, and around it a garden like those of her childhood, with 2,000 elms. Today the palace houses the French Senate, which owns the garden too.
The layout is a meeting of two worlds: a formal French parterre in the middle, with the Italian taste of Florence that Marie wanted to recreate around it. Children sailing model boats on the pond started a tradition that inspired similar ones elsewhere.
The center is the octagonal Grand Bassin, the pond of the model boats.
In the southwest corner there is an orchard of apple and pear trees, with beehives. The garden also has chess players, tennis courts, a puppet theatre and a vintage carousel, and free concerts in its gazebos.
There are just over a hundred statues, monuments and fountains: twenty queens and illustrious women of France around the central lawn, George Sand and Verlaine, and even a small model of Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty.
Don't miss the Medici Fountain, built in 1620 as a grotto, a nymphaeum, and moved in the 1860s. Auguste Ottin's sculptures show the giant Polyphemus spying on the lovers Acis and Galatea.
Later kings neglected the garden, the future Louis XVIII sold off a slice, and the Revolution enlarged it with the land of the Carthusian monks next door.
In Les Misérables, this is where Marius and Cosette first meet.
The garden has been shrinking and growing for four centuries. It began at eight hectares, reached thirty by 1630, and took its present size only after the post-Revolutionary changes.