Have you ever visited the catacombs in Paris? No? Then I humbly suggest you add them to your bucket list. Really. Skip the enormous queues at the Eiffel Tower, or the crush around the Mona Lisa, and head underground. Also, if you have read and enjoyed ‘Pure,’ by Andrew Miller (an extraordinary and brilliant novel set among the bones and stinking corpses of Le Cimitiére des Innocents in 1785) then you absolutely have to visit the catacombs. To explain: the ossuaries and cemeteries of Paris were overflowing with corpses in the 1780s, and the stench had become unbearable. To resolve the problem, the bones of six million people were relocated into empty mine tunnels underneath the city. You can walk through the tunnels and see the bones. That is pretty much it, and in itself should make the catacombs worth a visit, but the story gets more macabre. Each cemetery was allocated a room – or a space within the tunnels. Some simply dumped their bones in massive heap. But other took a more artistic approach. They created walls out of skulls, and crafted elaborate patterns with the bones. You will never see anything more ghoulish or gruesome yet simultaneously charming. Beautiful patterns constructed out of dead people. It is morbid, but oddly it isn’t spooky. The walk around the tunnels is about a mile, and then you find yourself disgorged onto an unfamiliar street, nowhere near where you went in. Give it a go. You will never look at a skeleton in the same way again.
What3words: piston.prompting.among
what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
.jpg)