Just before dawn, the mist from the Seine drifts lightly into the city, clinging in shreds to stately bridges and capturing Paris in its famed black-and-white essence. Cobbled streets are calm and empty. As pigeons stir the serene quiet in gray smudges of motion, bakeries and pastry shops begin to spin out warm, doughy, flaky treats. In a city known the world over for its pre-eminent cuisine, the morning would be incomplete without the comforting noises and tantalizing smells of the day’s first feast.

Paris has many faces, but its soul is rooted in a 2000-year history filled with controversy, decadence, love, revolution, and great food. Some travelers are content with a weekend fling in the city of lights; others take a lifetime to discover its hidden (and not-so-hidden) treasures. The Louvre, the Centre George Pompidou, and the Musée d’Orsay boast some of the most inspiring and well-known artwork in the world, housed in museums that are feats unto themselves; but depending on your mood, happiness could just as well be lurking in a Latin Quarter jazz club, downtown disco, or Left Bank bookstore. This is Paris: brunch in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Marais, meet the Mona Lisa’s infamous gaze, and dance the night away on the Champs-Elysées.

No matter where you stroll, dance, or tap to the beat, you will be following in the footsteps of someone who came to Paris in search of inspiration and managed to change the world. An entire generation of hungry intellectuals was lured by the call of academic and artistic freedom (not to mention great croissants) during and after World War II. A growing community of thinkers and writers flocked to the cafés to argue, write, and drink, hoping for the kind of spark that had inspired genius from Leonardo da Vinci to the revolutionaries of 1789. In the 1940s and 50s Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Hemingway took their seats in the cafés of the 6ème arrondissement; they set the dramatic tone for café life that prevails even today, as great ideas are debated and novels are written under the influence of very potent espresso.

From tiny alleys hiding the world’s best bistros to broad avenues flaunting the highest of haute couture, from the old stone of the Nôtre-Dame cathedral to the futuristic impulses of the Parc de la Villette, from street performers to the Comédie Francaise, from the relics of the first millenium to the celebration of the second, Paris presents itself as both a harbor of tradition and a place of impulse, coyly hiding a discovery around every corner.