The choice on a free afternoon in Paris is rarely between the Louvre and the Orsay, it is between a fourth big queue and two places you can stand inside without booking anything. I take the second option, and the two below are a twenty-minute walk apart on the same stretch of the left bank, which is the only reason they appear in the same afternoon rather than in two separate trips.
The arena behind a plain door
Paris was a river crossing before it was a capital. The Parisii lived on the islands, Rome arrived in 52 BC under Caesar and called the settlement Lutetia, and by the second century the city had an amphitheatre on the slope that is now the fifth arrondissement. The arena covered roughly 25,000 square feet and held something like 16,000 spectators, which is more people than the quarters around it contain today.
Gladiator contests ran there for a couple of centuries and stopped when the games stopped mattering to the city. The structure was pulled down during the incursions of 280 AD, the pit filled in and used as a burial ground, and by the late twelfth century the whole thing was under a defensive wall built across the district. It stayed there for six hundred years.
The wall was removed during building work in 1869 and the arena turned up underneath it, which is the sort of discovery a city council has to pay for. Paris did not have the money, the excavation was abandoned, and the site was only bought back and cleared in 1883 with Victor Hugo arguing publicly for it. A proper dig followed in 1916, and in 1980 the residents of the street stopped a development that would have built over what was left. All of that is why the ground under your feet is sand and not a car park.
Getting in
This is the part that surprises people who expect a ticket office. It is open, it is free, and there is no queue because almost nobody on the street knows there is anything behind the wall.
- Take the metro to Monge on line 7 and walk to number 47 Rue Monge.
- Go through the passage in the middle of the building. There is a sign, but it is smaller than the kebab shop next to it.
- Keep walking down the corridor until the light changes. The floor drops to the sandy level of the original arena floor.
- Allow twenty minutes inside. More if you want to sit on the stone benches, which is what everybody ends up doing.
The arena is used as a public pitch in the evenings and there are usually a few people playing. That is not a compromise, it is the reason the place survived: it has never been a museum, only a courtyard that happens to be two thousand years old.
The garden on the other side of the river
Twenty minutes south-east, across the Pont d'Austerlitz, the Jardin des Plantes fills the whole bend of the river. The royal garden of medicinal herbs opened to the public in 1640 under Louis XIV, on a licence granted by Louis XIII fourteen years earlier, and it has been a collection of separate gardens ever since the Revolution gave it the name it carries now. The site runs to about 2,600,000 square feet, and the Botanical School inside it grows some 4,500 plants on its own.
What makes it worth an afternoon is that the gardens are not decorative. There is a rose garden with around 170 varieties, a botanical school with labelled beds, and a mansion from 1650 sitting among them. Ten minutes in from the gate the city noise drops away completely, which is not something you can say about the squares on the other bank.
The alpine beds
Toward the far end, between the otter basin and the alley named for the naturalist Cuvier, a 40,000 square foot parcel was set aside in 1931 for plants that grow above the treeline. It holds around 2,000 varieties, and the labels name places that sound improbable in a Paris garden: the Balkans, Morocco, the Caucasus, the Himalaya, Japan, China, Spain, and the mountains of the eastern United States.
Two trees carry dates on their labels. An eighteenth-century pistachio stands near the beds, and an acacia planted in 1636, brought over from the eastern United States, is the oldest living thing on the site. A Lebanese cedar across the garden arrived in France in 1734. I read the dates first and the species second, which is a habit I have never managed to break.
How I put the two together
They work as a single loop if you start at the arena and finish at the river. The order matters, because the garden is the better half of the afternoon.
- Leave the arena by the same passage and walk down Rue Monge to the river, about fifteen minutes at an easy pace.
- Cross at the Pont d'Austerlitz and enter the garden at Place Valhubert, the semi-circular plaza at the end of the bridge.
- Walk the length of the garden to the alpine beds first, before the light goes flat in the late afternoon.
- Circle back through the rose garden and come out at the same gate. The metro at Gare d'Austerlitz is four minutes away.
The garden is open daily from eight in the morning until six, so in winter the last hour is the one to use, when the low sun comes across the river and the beds are still readable. The arena has no closing time of its own beyond the daylight, and I would see it first while there is still enough light to find the passage.
What I would change
I would drop the third stop. There is a natural tendency, standing on the left bank, to add a monument that sits between the two, and that addition is what turns a walkable afternoon into a metro afternoon. Two places, one loop, and an hour left over for a coffee on the way back is the version that holds together.