"Montmartre tour" a Paris Travel Page by Dabs

The Place des Abbesses is a good place to start a tour of Montmartre, there are 280 stairs at this station and there is an elevator for those who don't want to make the climb.

The metro entrance for the Abbesses metro stop was designed in the art nouveau style by Hector Guimard and is the only one with its glass roof intact.

Our guide told us that there was initial reluctance to use the metro and that the glass roofs helped people to feel that they weren't like moles going underground.

Across from the Abbesses metro station is this pretty church decorated with turquoise mosaics.

It was the first important building to be built of reinforced concrete, finished in 1904, designed by Anatole de Baudot.

This apartment building was the home of Theo Van Gogh, the art dealer brother of Vincent Van Gogh. Vincent Van Gogh lived here for a short period of time, before his legendary ear cutting off and his eventual suicide at the age of 37.

Our guide told us their apartment was the one beneath the window with the flower box.

One of the last remaining windmills in Montmartre

Based on a story by Marcel Ayme about a mild-mannered man named who discovers one day that he can walk through walls and becomes a famous thief.

Then he falls for a woman who is locked up nightly by her nasty husband. Of course, he can slip easily in and out of her room without using a key.

But one day as he does this, he has a headache and accidentally takes a pill that had been prescribed to cure his affliction and ends up stuck for eternity on his way through a wall.

Legend has it that St. Denis, after being decapitated, picked up his head, washed it off and carried it 4-5 miles to the spot where he wanted to be buried.

In 1875 painter Andre Gill painted a sign of a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan, "Le Lapin à Gill" which was changed into Au Lapin Agile. Many artists and writers frequented this cabaret.