Araminta18
DIS Veteran
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- Mar 11, 2016
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Pere Lachaise Cemetery - Friday, June 7th 2024 (part 1)
My first picture from today is time-stamped at 11:59 am - clearly I was documenting all the things! I know I must have gotten up and gotten breakfast, because pastries and an omelet cooked by someone who is not me? yes please. But not sure why the delay between breakfast and doing my thing for the day...maybe I took another nap? No idea. Anyways.
Where was I heading today? Pere LaChaise Cemetery! This was recommended to me back when I went in 2022, but I didn't make it then, so I figured now would be a good time. Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and other famous people are buried here, and apparently it's also just a nice quiet place. So I downloaded a Rick Steve's audio tour and headed off on the metro to the cemetery, arriving right before noon.
I was surprised to see that I had to go up stairs to get in! It's like the whole cemetery is elevated:
The path I'm on is the cemetery, but you can see off to the right that the road is down a bit.
Anyways, I'd looked at the map and had an idea of some of the graves I wanted to visit, but mostly I figured I'd follow the audio tour, since that included most of the grave I was interested in.
This one wasn't on the tour, but it was on the way to the starting point of the tour, so it worked out: Belize's grave! He wrote the opera "Carmen", among other things.
The audio tour started at the main entrance (duh... ), and was really a great find. Super easy to follow, and very informative. Highly recommend! I got to see where Maria Callas's ashes were for a while:
They aren't there anymore, but they were there for a while.
Then of course, Oscar Wilde's grave:
Yes, there is a clear plastic shield around it - no lipstick marks, please!
Then, Gertrude Stein - she of the "America is my country but Paris is my hometown" quote:
I like the heart in the darker stones there.
There were a bunch of monuments to those who died in concentration camps during World War II, as well as several monuments to the resistance fighters who were killed.
Then, Edith Piaf's grave -
Her life was super tragic. Part of what I liked about the audio tour was it gave some of that context and history for each of the famous graves.
This was a grave that wasn't on my list but was on the tour - a cartoonist who was murdered in the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
Moliere!
He wasn't buried here originally, but his remains were moved here after the cemetery opened, in an effort to make the cemetery seem fashionable and cool. I guess it worked? Lots of famous people are buried here now.