Paris Travel Guide - HTML5

of France made their mark on Paris with the Louvre and the Palais Royal , both in the 1st. In the 19th century, Baron von Hausmann set about reconstructing the city, by adding the long straight avenues and replacing many of the then existing medieval houses, with grander and more uniform buildings. New wonders arrived during La Belle Époque , as the Parisian golden age of the late 19th century is known. Gustave Eiffel's famous tower, the first metro lines, most of the parks, and the streetlights (which are partly believed to have given the city its epithet "the city of light") all come from this period. Another source of the epithet comes from Ville Lumière , a reference not only to the revolutionary electrical lighting system implemented in the streets of Paris, but