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Musée Grévin
This large waxworks museum inside the passage Jouffroy boasts 300 wax figures that largely look more like caricatures than characters, but where else do you get to see Marilyn Monroe, Charles de Gaulle and Spiderman face-to-face or the real death masks of French Revolutionary leaders? The admission fee is positively outrageous and just keeps a-growin'.
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Musée Guimet des Arts Asiatiques
The Guimet Museum of Asiatic Arts is France's foremost repository for Asian art and has sculptures, paintings, objets d'art and religious articles from Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Tibet, Cambodia, China, Japan and Korea. Besides its impressive permanent collection, the Museum stages temporary exhibitions and runs educational courses for the public.
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Musée Jacquemart-André
This museum, founded by collector Édouard André and his portraitist wife Nélie Jacquemart, is housed in an opulent mid-19th-century residence. It contains original furniture, tapestries and enamels but is most noted for its paintings by Rembrandt and Van Dyck and Italian Renaissance works by Bernini, Botticelli, Tintoretto, Titian, Uccello and more.
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Musée Maillol-Fondation Diana Vierny
This splendid small museum focuses on the work of the sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) and also includes works by Matisse, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Cézanne and Picasso from the private collection of Dina Vierny (born 1915), who was Maillol's principal model for 10 years from the age of 15. The museum is located in the stunning 18th-century Hôtel Bouchardon.
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Musée Marmottan-Monet
The Marmottan-Monet Museum, which is two blocks east of the Bois de Boulogne and between Porte de la Muette and Porte de Passy, has the world's largest collection of works by the impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) - some 100 chefs d'œuvre - as well as paintings by Gauguin, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Manet and Berthe Morisot.
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Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle
France's national museum of natural history incorporates three separate centres adjoining the Jardin des Plantes: the Galerie de Minéralogie et de Gélogie, dealing with minerals and geology; the Galerie d'Anatomie Comparée et de Paléontologie, focussing on anatomy and fossils; and the most interesting, the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, with topical exhibits about humanity's effect on the ecosystem and global warming.
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Musée National du Moyen Age
The National Museum of the Middle Ages (sometimes called the Musée de Cluny, or just Cluny), is fittingly housed in both the remains of Gallo-Roman baths (c AD 200), and the 15th-century Hôtel de Cluny, Paris' finest civil medieval building. The highlight is the series of 15th-century tapestries, The Lady with the Unicorn . Its foliage inspired the forest planted outside.
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Musée National Eugène Delacroix
The father of French Romanticism lived at this intimate courtyard studio until his death in 1863. Although his most famous works are at the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay , as well as St-Sulpice, the museum's collection of oils, watercolours, pastels and drawings, and, especially, its location off a magnolia-shaded square, make it a delight.
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Musée National Gustave Moreau
The National Gustave Moreau Museum, about 500m southwest of place Pigalle, is dedicated to the eponymous symbolist painter's work. Housed in what was once Moreau's studio, the two-storey museum is crammed with 4800 of his paintings, drawings and sketches. Some of Moreau's paintings are fantastic - in both senses of the word.
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Musée Nissim de Camondo
The Nissim de Camondo Museum, housed in a sumptuous mansion modelled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles , displays 18th-century furniture, wood panelling, tapestries, porcelain and other objets d'art collected by Count Moïse de Camondo, a Jewish banker who settled in Paris from Constantinople in the late 19th century.
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Musée Pasteur
Housed in the apartment where the famous chemist and bacteriologist spent the last seven years of his life (1888-95), a tour of this museum takes you through Pasteur's private rooms, a hall with such odds and ends as gifts presented to him by heads of state and drawings he did as a young man.
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Musée Picasso
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was the outstanding genius of 20th-century art, and his capacity for work was superhuman: he painted, drew and otherwise created from his early youth until his death at the age of 91. Much of his prolific and prodigious legacy can be found in the wonderful Musée Picasso.
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Musée Rodin
When he died, the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1907) left his magnificent 18th-century residence and a huge body of work to the state in lieu of rent. One of the most tranquil spots in the city, the Musée Rodin is also many visitors' favourite Paris museum.
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Palais de Chaillot & Jardins du Trocadéro
The two curved, colonnaded wings of the Palais de Chaillot, built for the 1937 World Exhibition held in Paris, and the terrace in between them afford an exceptional panorama of the Jardins du Trocadéro, the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.
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Palais de la Découverte
The Palace of Discovery is a fascinating science museum with interactive exhibits on astronomy, biology, medicine, chemistry, maths, computer science, physics and earth sciences. Inaugurated during the 1937 Exposition Universelle, it was the world's first interactive museum.
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Palais de Tokyo
The Tokyo Palace, in a 1937 World Exhibition building next to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, opened in 2002 as a 'Site de Création Contemporain' (site for contemporary arts). An event-driven rather than static museum, it has no permanent collection, and doesn't do single artist/theme exhibitions, but showcases ephemeral artwork and installations.
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Palais Garnier
This renowned opera house was designed in 1860 by Charles Garnier to showcase the splendour of Napoleon III's France. Unfortunately, by the time it was completed 15 years later, the Second Empire was a distant memory and Napoleon III was six feet under. Still it is one of the most impressive monuments erected in Paris during the 19th century and today stages operas, ballets and classical-music concerts.
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Panthéon
The Panthéon is a superb example of 18th-century neoclassicism but its ornate marble interior is gloomy in the extreme. The 80-odd permanent residents of the crypt include Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis Braille, Victor Hugo, and Émile Zola. Personages removed for reburial elsewhere after a re-evaluation of their greatness include Mirabeau and Marat.
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Parc de Belleville
One of the best panoramas of Paris unfolds alongside the teensy vineyard at the top of this little-known park. Terraced down the slopes over 4.5 hectares, early mornings see locals from the nearby Chinese community practising t'ai chi on the upper lawns. The Maison de l'Air is located at the bottom of the park.
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Parc de Bercy
This park, which links the Palais Omnisports with Bercy Village, is a particularly attractive 14-hectare public garden. On an island in the centre of one of its large ponds is the Maison du Lac du Parc de Bercy with temporary exhibitions. The Maison du Jardinage in the centre of the park takes a close look at gardening and the environment.
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Parc de la Villette
Opened in 1993, this 35-hectare park in the city's far northeastern corner stretches from the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie southwards to the Citeé de la Musique. It is the largest open green space in central Paris and has been called 'the prototype of the urban park of the 21st century'.
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Parc des Buttes-Chaumont
Encircled by tall apartment blocks, the 25-hectare Buttes-Chaumont Park is the closest thing in Paris to Manhattan's Central Park. The park's lush, forested slopes hide grottoes and artificial waterfalls, and the romantic lake is dominated by a temple-topped island. Once a quarry and rubbish tip, the park was given its present form by Baron Haussmann in the 1860s.
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Parc du Champ de Mars
Running southeast from the Eiffel Tower, the grassy 'Field of Mars' (named after Mars, the Roman god of war) was originally used as a parade ground for the cadets of the 18th-century École Militaire (Military Academy), the vast, French-classical building (1772) at the southeastern end of the park, which counts none other than Napoleon Bonaparte among its graduates.
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Petit Palais
The 'Little Palace', like the Grand Palais opposite also built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, is home to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, the Paris municipality's Museum of Fine Arts. It specialises in medieval and Renaissance objets d'art like porcelain and clocks, tapestries, drawings and 19th-century French painting and sculpture.
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Place de la Bastille
Nothing remains of the former prison that was mobbed on 14 July 1789, igniting the French Revolution, but you can't miss the 52m green-bronze column topped by a gilded, winged Liberty. Revolutionaries from the uprising of 1830 are buried beneath. Now a skirmishly busy roundabout, the place is still Paris' most symbolic destination for traffic-stopping political protest marches.
