I’m finally going!
And though, I’m 90% sure what I want to do - I’m looking for final suggestions on things I should see and things I might want to do and places I’ll love going.
Thanks!
You’ll be bringing pictures to the George & Dragon some night, right?
I have no London advice and have never been to Rome, but my favorite things to do in Paris:
[ul]
[li]Arènes de Lutece and Jardin des Plantes[/li][li]Cimitière Père-Lachaise[/li][li]free classical concerts in churches or conservatories (see Pariscope, available at any news kiosk)[/li][li]walk from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe[/li][li]Parc Monceau (near my old apartment)[/li][li]Musée de Cluny (medieval)[/li][li]day trip to Chartres (about 90 min by train)[/li][/ul]
Have a great time…
First and foremost is the fact that I have not been to London so forget that.
I have been to Rome to 5 times for a total of over 5 weeks and to Paris three times for a total of three weeks, and my advice is very simple and can be summarized with these thoughts:
[ul]
[li]Get a good street map of the Centro Storico in Rome, put it in your pocket, start walking, expect to get lost at least once every hour, and enjoy what you you see as you wander aimlessly through the streets.[/li][li]Paris has the far better subway system, so do the same as Rome except buy lots of tickets for the Metro and enjoy yourself.[/li][li]Get a Michelin Green Guide for each city, study it before you leave and have some idea of what you want to see (even if it’s in the midst of a lost walk).[/li][li]Pick out where you want to eat in advance, make reservations if necessary, and go there. The cuisines and restaurants (bistros and trattorias, hosterias, oh my) of Paris and Rome are worthy of any budgetary limits you want to set.[/li][/ul]
The older I get the less important it is to have a set agenda. My last two trips to both Paris and Rome have been with my daughters and they have been immensely rewarding and enjoyable for the sheer pleasure of being able to share these two magical places with someone else.
I’m sorry, but I did forget to mention that if you ever want an understanding of the reason and justification of the French Revolution, take the day trip from Paris (by train) to Versailles.
Also, despite your own religious preferences, visit each of the churches under the control of the Vatican in Rome (St. Peters, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterno, and St. Paul outside the walls - pardon my lack of proper Latin names). You will be humbled and amazed. And don’t forget the Pantheon (both Paris and Rome!).
I’ve been to all three, and can say that you’re going to some of the world’s greatest cities – I envy you.
Since the other’s focused on Paris and Rome…
London is actually probably my favorite city in the world. It’s just huge, and there’s no end of stuff to do. Be sure to check out the museums (the National Gallery and the British Museums being the two absolute essentials). Almost all the museums in London are completely FREE, which is truly awesome. In the National Gallery you can get a set of headphones that will give you informative lectures on just about every piece in the gallery. These are also FREE, even though they don’t advertise the fact – they enourage donations, but you can give as much as you want, or nothing at all.
Visit the Palace, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s, Hyde Park, the Theater District (take in a show!), Leicester Square, Piccadilly, etc. Pick one of the many walking tours from London Walks, a great walking tour. Visit the Churchhill Museum, and Westminster Abbey. Go to the bookshops and the British Library. Go to Highgate Cemetary and see Communists paying their respects to Karl Marx.
You’re going to have an awesome time whatever you do. Enjoy!
Yes, make good use of the free museums. To be fair, it’s a few of the largest well-known ones that are free, not ‘most’ of them.
Don’t expect to see all of the British Museum, or all of the National Gallery, or all of the V&A. Each could take a week by itself.
Spend plenty of time walking around…get a good map, and you’ll start to work out how things are laid out, and you’ll see far more this way than trying to travel from place to place by bus or tube.
Carry an umbrella.
Overhyped tourist attractions to avoid in London:
Buckingham Palace - a dreadfully ugly & boring building
Madame Tussauds - how did this ever get so popular?
Just went to Rome earlier this year and loved it. I assume you’ll see the usual – the forum, the Palantine, the Colosseum, the Pantheon. One area that wasn’t very crowded was Trajan’s Markets, right near the Forum. For a ocuple of euro you can walk around the ruins and look at Trajan’s Column up close (although there was scaffolding around it when we were there). The Capitoline Museums were also impressive.
If you spend a little time you can get acquainted with the bus system, which I found to be a great way of getting around the city. One item of note – you have to purchase tickets from a magazine stand, restaurant, or some other vendor. You can’t purchase them on the bus. We found that out when we hopped on a bus and couldn’t find a way to purchase a ticket.
Well, unlike GorillaMan I enjoyed the Buckingham Palace tour. And the Changing of the Guards was fun. There are several bus tours, I would recommend the Big Bus. They also include some walking tours in their ticket price and it was a pretty good time. The War Museum was also a good free museum, but it has the same problems as the British Museum and the National Gallery. Way too big to see in any kind of short time. But the Rosetta Stone is easy to find and worth the time.
The Tower of London was great fun, if you have a day for it. And in the evening Covent Gardens was also a lot of fun. I spent 6 days there and could have easily spent 6 weeks.
In Rome, the typical stops, the Coliseum, the Forum, etc., are things you want to see. In London, you see things hundreds of years old and they seem ancient. Then in Rome, you will see things that really are ancient, and were when London was a village. And Waterman is right about the various churches in and around the Vatican. Worth seeing even if you don’t believe.
Thanks for putting more business my cousins’ way! Tell them Mickey’s boy sent you, amarinth (they’ll probably tell you to eff off, but try it anyway).
If you are going to Paris in the summer, a great way to avoid the heat - unless you’re squeamish - is to visit the Catacombs at 1, place Denfert-Rochereau (nearest Metro station: Denfert-Rochereau).
It didn’t do me any good when I tried it. 
Lok
I’d second these, especially the *Musée Cluny * (officially the Musée national du Moyen Age).
I also enjoyed going to the top of *La Grande Arche * at La Défense.
Paris and Rome!
Rome is great architecture and ancient history wrapped around the whole Catholic Church thing. There are over 200 churches and the fascinating thing is walking into obscure churches and finding incredible works of art. Rome is one of the playgrounds of Bernini, Caravaggio, and Michaelangelo. It is crooked little streets winding up and down the hills.
Paris is the City of Lights and romance and most people don’t realize that most of Paris that you see dates from the mid to late 19th Century after Napoleon III gave Haussman free reign to rid the city of slums and improve the traffic patterns. Haussman created many of the wide boulevards at the expense of wiping out most of the old architecture. BTW if you want to see old Paris then by all means walk through the incredibly beautiful and historic area on the Ile Saint Louis (with buildings dating to the 16th Century), which also has the best ice cream shop in all of Paris.
And last of all are the incredible eateries that fill both cities. Save some extra bucks to take with you and treat yourself to some bistros and trattorias while there. London (and the British) can’t hold a candle to either Paris or Rome in terms of cuisine.
It certainly does. I’m not Catholic, but when visiting some of the older churches I was more than a little awed to think that “there has been a working parish here for 1600 years.” In some cases, they’ve been using the same building all that time, and you can see that the columns were taken from older Roman buildings. In one church, the apse mosaic shows Christ with a couple of donors, dressed in togas–and you realize that the artist who made that mosaic was not hearkening back to an earlier age…but people actually did wear togas when he made it! Well, upper class people, on formal occasions, at least. Be sure you visit the Church of San Clemente. Underneath the nave there are the remnants of an early medieval predecessor, from sometime during the 500s, and below that there is a temple dedicated to Mithras. In visiting the latter, you’ll be led through a short corridor about four feet wide, and be told that that’s actually a street you’re walking through.
Though such sites as the Forum, the Palatine, and Colosseum are cordoned off as specific “sights” that you pay a small fee to see, elsewhere in the city its ancient history can be found in the very bones of the city.
As for London, if you have any interest in micromosaics or other decorative art, go see the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House. These were going to be donated to my local art museum, but then the owner changed his mind and packed them off to London instead–and this after decades of having displayed them in our museum and promising all the while that he would grant them permanently. I can’t say how much I miss seeing them. It’d be one of the first things I’d want to look at in London.