4min chapter

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607a Bridges and Little Museums of Paris; Burgundy

Travel with Rick Steves

CHAPTER

The Pont Des Artes: A Bridge of the Arts

The New Bridge was the first bridge in Paris to not have houses on either side. The Pont des Artes is a walking bridge and an open-air art gallery with statuary. A love lock has been banned from the Ponte Nuff because it threatened safety of the bridge. Mushrooms are like weeds or rashes that you can't keep down, says author.

00:00
Speaker 6
It means the New Bridge, even though it's the oldest bridge in Paris. And when it was built, it was finished in the beginning of the 17th century. It was a miracle. It was an architectural dazzling creation because it was the first bridge that didn't have houses on either side so that people would come to the Pontneuf and look at the expanse of the river. It became the heart and soul of Paris where you would come and have all sorts of wild activities. You could join up for the army or buy exotic oranges or have a tooth pulled or watch jugglers or exchange gossip. You could buy false teeth and glass eyes and wooden legs and live
Speaker 1
poultry and skin whitener. So it really was the place to be. It was a gathering place, a piazza for the city. It was. You know what? That's exactly right. It's like a piazza in the shape of a bridge. Now when you said it didn't have houses on either side, are you talking like lined with houses and shops like the Pontovecchio and Florence and the London Bridge in London? They see them exactly. You finally had an open view to the river and you didn't
Speaker 6
have these barriers in the shape of houses blocking the visual
Speaker 1
joy of the daily life. That's a mark of a city that has some pride because it's just a practical matter. If you had a bridge that you needed to help pay for and maintain you'd rent out space to it and it would obliterate the fact that it feels like a bridge. So London Bridge and the Pontovecchio, it would be lined by shops that were paying rent to the city so they could have that great bridge. Pontovec, it's a piazza. That's great. The next bridge we come to is the Pont des Artes. What does that mean and how is it unique?
Speaker 6
Well it's the bridge of the arts and I love this bridge because it's a walking bridge. It's a pedestrian bridge and so it's a great bridge for picnicking. But if you stand in front of this bridge at the Louvre and look through a gorgeous courtyard that not many people know about, it's called the Courcate, the square courtyard, you can look through the arch and you can see right across the bridge to the Estétou de France on the other side of the river, which is where the academy, France, says is, and you just feel like you've got this magical long
Speaker 1
view of Paris. And this is a pedestrian bridge and I love the way Paris prioritizes for pedestrians and on many occasions it's actually an open-air art gallery with some beautiful statuary to enjoy and it's just part of a love of life on the streets in Paris.
Speaker 6
Yes, exactly. And it underscores how there is this everyday sharing partage between the bridge and the river.
Speaker 1
And it just inspires so much romance and all these romantics were coming there as they do all over Europe these days with their padlocks and locked their love on the bridge with these padlocks and through the keys into the river, but that actually threatened the actual safety of the bridge, didn't it?
Speaker 6
It did, and they were banned from the Ponteiser, and so the love lock people then moved over to the Ponte Nuff, but what happened one day is that one of the panels fell into the river, and I sort of think that maybe there were a lot of American tourists on the tourist boats below threatening to sue the city of Paris if one of them fell on the boat. So they're technically banned now, although you can see them,
Speaker 1
the love locks kind of cropping up at the edge of bridges every place where there's like a little hook. They're just like weeds or rashes that you can't keep down. It is such an amazing mushroom. Mushrooms. Mushrooms, that's what it is, because all over Europe, you know, officials try to save the bridge by not letting people do that, and they find little areas to lock their locks, and I guess people have to show their love some way, and it helps the people who sell locks stay in business like that. Exactly.

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