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Quartier Latin
Tuesday, 1/6/09
The Panthéon:
The Quartier Latin, once the university center of Paris, is still full of chapels and universities. Sophie took us to le Collège des Bernadins, which has variously served as a college, a church, a fire station, and a library. We saw it as the home of three exhibits by the artist Claudio Parmiggiani. The first was of shattered glass panels—silent when we saw them, of course, but imagine the chaos and the deafening, liberating shower of sound that must have filled every corner of the space as the glass was being broken! The second was an ash imprint of a library against a wall. Shelves upon shelves of 20,000 books were pressed against the wall, then set on fire and consequently removed, leaving a somber negative, its ash imprint as fragile as memory. The third was a collection of Italian church bells, some stacked, some upset, scattered across a corner of what was once the church’s sacristy, variously lit by the rays of sunlight spilling in through the high arched windows.
Art installations in the Collège des Bernadins:
We walked through narrow, cobbled medieval paths, past the old Ecole Polytechnique building, past fragments of a protective wall built in the middle ages against the storm of Paris by the Duke of Normandy, past the Lycée Henri IV, to the Eglise Sainte Geneviève, patron saint of Paris. The latter was brightly lit in comparison to Notre Dame, and a giant scallop shell in the back held holy water. We passed the Panthéon, which honors the men (and one woman) who have brought glory to France, before making our way to the Sorbonne, which embodies the educational spirit of the quarter.
K.B.
Eglise Sainte Geneviève and Inside Sorbonne:
