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The original Olympic games got cancelled for 1500 years because … well … everyone was naked. The Ancient Greek Olympic Games, held from 776 BC to 393 AD, so that’s nearly 10 times longer ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/07/26/the-ancient-and-very-naked-olympics/
“The Seine is a great place to have a crisis, since it clearly embodies the strength and the uncertainty, the beauty and the challenge of Paris itself.” – James Baldwin The Seine river fl...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/06/08/drama-on-the-seine-a-compendium-of-watery-turmoil/
Remember that beautiful Parisian village featured in the Oscar-winning 1950s short film The Red Balloon? Well we’re sorry to report that it was almost entirely levelled by the French governme...
It all started with this those three girls on a rock in 1922, putting my beach snaps to shame. Why is it, that with all the technology we have at our disposal to document every moment of our ho...
Every summer we run into the same problem: too many amazing festivals, too little time. Then we caught wind of the long lost Delphic Festivals, which makes every concert we’ve ever been to pa...
Forget the Olympics. Forget PT Barnum’s legendary spectacles. It was Paris, in my opinion that wins the prize for putting on the greatest show on Earth. Photographs of the Universal Expositio...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/04/10/when-paris-built-the-greatest-show-on-earth/
The only place more frequented than the Eiffel Tower, according to 19th century Parisians, was the exalted mattress of the Valtesse de la Bigne. Her story is the quintessential rags-to-riches t...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/03/07/the-courtesan-all-of-paris-fell-for/
Parisians often talk about the great travesty that was the loss of Les Halles, a legendary food market in the heart of Paris, fondly referred to as “the belly of Paris”, a seemingly indestr...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/10/05/searching-for-a-lost-wine-village-in-paris/
Is it just me or is there something about precariously-positioned hotels called “The Belvedere”? Remember this one I found while ‘location scouting’ for Wes Anderson? Well, I’ve found...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/06/14/welcome-to-the-time-capsule-railway-hotel/
There’s a curious expression used in Provence by pétanque players. “Embrasser Fanny” or to “kiss Fanny”, is a small recompense for making a fool of oneself to put it simply. But wher...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/05/12/the-art-of-kissing-fanny/
Last night I was standing at the counter of our local café on Boulevard Saint Germain, finishing off a last glass of wine after work before heading home for the evening, when I noticed somet...
I had been curious about what was behind the door of No. 6 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in Saint Germain for quite a while before I decided to Google it, half expecting to be disappointed by news that it...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/10/13/inside-a-time-capsule-fencing-club-of-paris/
“Things go better with Coke”? Not the French apparently– at least, not when Coca Cola first officially began marketing the drink here in 1950. According to these photographs I came acro...
I came across these curious photographs from the French National library, dated to 1932 and labelled, “École d’aviation sur le toit des Galeries Lafayette” – Aviation school on the ...
If you ever got around to watching Life of Pi you might recall the hero of the film, a young Indian boy living in French colonial India, was ironically named ‘Piscine Molitor Patel’, aft...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/06/03/the-ruins-of-piscine-molitor-rise-again/
In Paris, every first Wednesday of the month at noon, without fail you can hear the eerie wail of an air raid siren from wherever you are in the city. They’ve been going since pre-World War I...