Passage du Caire

Step into Passage du Caire and you're immediately somewhere unexpected. This narrow glass-roofed corridor stretches 370 meters through the Sentier district, yet it's only 2.60 meters wide. The oldest covered arcade in Paris, built in 1798, and most people walk straight past it.

Before you go further, look down. That floor beneath your feet? Originally paved with gravestones taken from a 13th-century convent demolished during the Revolution. The nuns didn't quite get a say in the matter.

At the entrance, three statues of an Egyptian goddess with cow ears welcome you. They're here because the passage was named after Cairo, riding the wave of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Paris loved an exotic theme in those days.

Now, the area just outside this passage was once home to the Cour des Miracles, the infamous medieval hideout for beggars and criminals that Victor Hugo immortalized in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The attached image gives you a sense of how wonderfully grim that must have looked.

Inside, the arcade buzzes with wholesale fashion traders today. Printers, box makers, fashion merchants, grave-robbing architects. This passage has seen it all, and somehow it's still here.