Start at the Montmartre Museum, tucked away on the side of the hill. To get away from the crowds, take a walk on the back streets, where a bit of village Montmartre survives.Ī stroll takes you amid the traces of the many people who've lived here over the years: monks stomping grapes (1200s), farmers grinding grain in windmills (1600s), dust-coated gypsum miners (1700s), Parisian liberals (1800s), Modernist painters (1900s), and all the struggling artists, poets, dreamers, and drunkards who called Montmartre home. But if all you do is eat an overpriced crêpe and marvel at the views, you will have missed out on Montmartre's charm and history. These days, the hill is equal parts charm and kitsch - still vaguely small-town rustic but mobbed with tourists and pickpockets on sunny weekends. Its low rents lured struggling artists whose canvases now sell for millions (Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo). Back then, life on the hill was a working-class commotion of cafés, bistros, and dance halls. Just over a century ago, Montmartre hosted a perfect storm of artistic creativity and avant-garde thinking. The literal high point is the bone-white Sacre-Cœur Basilica, from where the City of Light fans out at your feet. Montmartre, the hilltop neighborhood hovering on the northern fringes of your Paris city map, is in many ways the perfect French cliché: red-and-white checkered tablecloths, artist's easels filling petite squares, and bohemian cabarets offering up high-kicking cancans.
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