The alternative Paris

NOBODY goes to Paris unprepared.

A first visit to the city almost has to follow a script: the iconic sites, the terrasses de café, the Latin Quarter and so on. It’s an itinerary that comes freighted with expectations, and not just your own. It has to live up to the idealisation of thousands of writers and filmmakers, everything from Hemingway’s memoirs, to Beckett on the boulevards, to Ratatouille and, just this year, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

It’s a lot to ask of any place, and maybe that’s why a Tripadvisor survey found that Paris was the most over-rated tourist city in Europe. And yes, the real Paris is surprisingly dirty, surprisingly easy to get bad food in, and for good coffee you’d be better off in Italy.