Paris — Paris Map Poster & Print

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Paris Map Poster & Print

From above, Paris is organised around a river that refuses to run straight. The Seine enters from the southeast, bends in a long arc and leaves to the southwest, with the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis anchored in the middle like two moored boats. Everything else seems to orbit that pair of islands, where the city began as a small settlement on the water.

The twenty arrondissements make the orbit literal. They are numbered in a clockwise spiral from the centre, curling outward like a snail shell until the sequence meets the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road that marks the city limit with unusual precision. Inside that loop, a Paris map poster shows two textures at once: the dense, irregular lanes of the medieval core and the long diagonal cuts laid over them.

Those cuts are the work of Baron Haussmann, who remade the city for Napoleon III in the mid nineteenth century. His boulevards meet at star-shaped squares, most famously the Place Charles de Gaulle, where twelve avenues radiate from the Arc de Triomphe. At the edges, the Bois de Boulogne to the west and the Bois de Vincennes to the east sit like two large, pale lungs.