Cimetière Père Lachaise

Père Lachaise cemetery is like a city within the city with its cobbled streets of funerary monuments, as well as a bucolic place for a weekend stroll. If you're interested in history or literature than Père Lachaise is like a snapshot of French history, with countless writers, artists, actresses, scientists, generals and politicians buried here (among them Géricault, Delacroix, Pissarro, Ingres, Colette, Rossini, Champollion and Sarah Bernhardt) and more sombre memorials to the Paris Commune and World War II deportees. There are fanciful supposed tombs of Abelard and Héloise, Molière and La Fontaine moved here when the cemetery opened in 1817 to make it fashionable. Among the cult tombs are those of Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde (sculpted by Epstein) and Jim Morrison and journalist Victor Noir, assassinated by Pierre Bonaparte in 1870.