LATIN QUARTER, Medieval Churches

Your tour of medieval Paris starts almost directly under the side of Notre-Dame at the entrance to Rue Saint-Jacques, where a delightful little garden offers you a corner of peace and silence shaded by centuries-old trees, starkly contrasting the crowds in the cathedral's churchyard. Between flowerbeds lined with architectural fragments from different eras, you'll come across the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. If you walk around the church and aren't fooled by the bare seventeenth-century façade, you should recognize the linear medieval structure which dates back to a transition period between Romanesque and Gothic.

Practically opposite the church on the other side of the road is the incredible church of Saint-Séverin, where you can see all the main architectural styles from the 1200s to the 1600s, including the 19th-century 'stylistic' restorations. This church has it all: a Baroque vault, an early-Gothic side portal, a fifteenth-century bell tower, and above all, an enchanting, bright, and peaceful Gothic interior. On the back walls the style becomes the so-called "flamboyant Gothic" from the late-15th century, which will leave you speechless with its virtuoso twist of branched vaults and the splendid pillar formed by a group of spiraling columns.

But the masterpiece of this flamboyant style lies beyond the Sorbonne, in the shadow of the Pantheon's large dome. It is the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, which began construction in the late 1400s....