Forum des Halles

Lonely Planet review

Les Halles, the city's main wholesale food market, occupied the area just south of the Église St-Eustache from the early 12th century until 1969, when it was moved lox, stock and lettuce leaf to the southern suburb of Rungis near Orly. In its place, this unspeakably ugly, four-level underground shopping centre was constructed in the glass-and-chrome style of the early 1970s.

Inside the Forum des Halles is the Pavillon des Arts, with temporary exhibits and a popular rooftop garden with a rather stunning sculpture by Henri de Miller (1953-99) called Listen, an oversized human head with its ear to the ground. In the warmer months, street musicians, fire-eaters and other performers display their talents here, especially at place Jean du Bellay, which is adorned by a multitiered Renaissance fountain, the Fontaine des Innocents (1549). It is named after the Cimetière des Innocents, a cemetery formerly on this site from which two million skeletons were disinterred after the Revolution, and transferred to the Catacombes , south of the Cimetière du Montparnasse in the 14e. A block south of the fountain is rue de la Ferronnerie, where erstwhile Huguenot Henri IV was stabbed to death in 1610 by a Catholic fanatic, while passing house No 11 in his carriage.