1.
Paris
–
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
2.
Parc des Buttes Chaumont
–
The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is a public park situated in northeastern Paris, in the 19th arrondissement. Occupying 24.7 hectares, it is the fifth-largest park in Paris, after the Bois de Vincennes, the Bois de Boulogne, the Parc de la Villette, and the Tuileries Garden. It was opened in 1867, late in the regime of Emperor Napoleon III, and was built by Jean-Charles Alphand, the park has 5.5 kilometres of roads and 2.2 kilometres of paths. The most famous feature of the park is the Temple de la Sibylle, inspired by the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy, perched at the top of a cliff fifty metres above the waters of the artificial lake. The park took its name from the hill which occupied the site. After the 1789 Revolution, it became a dump, and then a place for cutting up horse carcasses. Another part of the site was a former gypsum and limestone quarry mined for the construction of buildings in Paris and that quarry also yielded Eocene mammal fossils, including Palaeotherium, which were studied by Georges Cuvier. The work on the began in 1864, under the direction of Alphand, who used all the experience and lessons he had learned in making the Bois de Boulogne. Two years were required simply to terrace the land, then a railroad track was laid to bring in cars carrying two hundred thousand cubic meters of topsoil. A thousand workers remade the landscape, digging a lake and shaping the lawns, explosives were used to sculpt the buttes themselves and the former quarry into a picturesque mountain fifty meters high with cliffs, an interior grotto, pinnacles and arches. Hydraulic pumps were installed to lift the water from the canal of the Ourcq River up the highest point on the promontory, the chief gardener of Paris, horticulturist Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, then went to work, planting thousands of trees, shrubs and flowers, along with sloping lawns. The park was opened on April 1,1867, coinciding with the opening of the Paris Universal Exposition. The heart of the park is a lake of 1.5 hectares surrounding the Île de la Belvédère. On the top is the Temple de la Sibylle, fifty meters above the lake, the most famous feature of the park is the Temple de la Sibylle, a miniature version of the famous ancient Roman Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy. The temple was designed by Gabriel Davioud, the city architect for Paris, who designed picturesque monuments for the Bois de Boulogne, Bois de Vincennes, Parc Monceau and he also designed some of the most famous fountains of Paris, including the Fontaine Saint-Michel. The temple was finished in 1867, the grotto is a vestige of the old gypsum and limestone quarry that occupied part of the site, now adjacent to rue Botzaris on the south side of the park. An artificial waterfall, fed by pumps, cascades from the top of the cave, a 63-meter-long suspension bridge, eight meters above the lake, allows access to the belvedere. The bridge was designed by Gustave Eiffel, the creator of the Eiffel Tower, a twelve meter long masonry bridge, twenty-two meters above the lake, known as the suicide bridge, allows access to the belvedere from the south side of the park
3.
Middle Ages
–
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation, invasion, and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and later argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period
4.
Gypsum
–
Gypsum is a soft sulfate mineral composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate, with the chemical formula CaSO4·2H2O. It is widely mined and is used as a fertilizer, and as the constituent in many forms of plaster, blackboard chalk. Mohs scale of hardness, based on scratch Hardness comparison. It forms as a mineral and as a hydration product of anhydrite. The word gypsum is derived from the Greek word γύψος, plaster, because the quarries of the Montmartre district of Paris have long furnished burnt gypsum used for various purposes, this dehydrated gypsum became known as plaster of Paris. Upon addition of water, after a few tens of minutes plaster of Paris becomes regular gypsum again, causing the material to harden or set in ways that are useful for casting, Gypsum was known in Old English as spærstān, spear stone, referring to its crystalline projections. Gypsum may act as a source of sulfur for plant growth, which was discovered by J. M. Mayer, american farmers were so anxious to acquire it that a lively smuggling trade with Nova Scotia evolved, resulting in the so-called Plaster War of 1820. In the 19th century, it was known as lime sulfate or sulfate of lime. Gypsum is moderately water-soluble and, in contrast to most other salts, it exhibits retrograde solubility, when gypsum is heated in air it loses water and converts first to calcium sulfate hemihydrate, and, if heated further, to anhydrous calcium sulfate. As for anhydrite, its solubility in saline solutions and in brines is also dependent on NaCl concentration. Gypsum crystals are found to contain water and hydrogen bonding. Gypsum occurs in nature as flattened and often twinned crystals, and transparent, selenite contains no significant selenium, rather, both substances were named for the ancient Greek word for the Moon. Selenite may also occur in a silky, fibrous form, in case it is commonly called satin spar. Finally, it may also be granular or quite compact, in hand-sized samples, it can be anywhere from transparent to opaque. A very fine-grained white or lightly tinted variety of gypsum, called alabaster, is prized for ornamental work of various sorts, in arid areas, gypsum can occur in a flower-like form, typically opaque, with embedded sand grains called desert rose. It also forms some of the largest crystals found in nature, up to 12 m long, Gypsum is a common mineral, with thick and extensive evaporite beds in association with sedimentary rocks. Deposits are known to occur in strata from as far back as the Archaean eon, Gypsum is deposited from lake and sea water, as well as in hot springs, from volcanic vapors, and sulfate solutions in veins. Hydrothermal anhydrite in veins is commonly hydrated to gypsum by groundwater in near-surface exposures and it is often associated with the minerals halite and sulfur
5.
Montmartre
–
Montmartre is a large hill in Pariss 18th arrondissement. It is 130 m high and gives its name to the surrounding district, Montmartre is primarily known for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur on its summit and as a nightclub district. The other, older, church on the hill is Saint Pierre de Montmartre, Montmartre is also the setting for several hit films. This site is served by metro, with line 2 stations at Anvers, Pigalle, and Blanche and line 12 stations at Pigalle, Abbesses, Lamarck - Caulaincourt, texts from the 8th century cite the name of mons Mercori, and a 9th-century text speaks of Mount Mars. Excavations in 1975 north of the Church of Saint-Pierre found coins from the 3rd century, earlier excavations in the 17th century at the Fontaine-du-But found vestiges of Roman baths from the 2nd century. According to Hilduin, Denis collected his head and carried it as far as the fontaine Saint-Denis, then descended the slope of the hill. Hilduin wrote that a church had built in the place formerly called Mont de Mars. In 1134, king Louis VI purchased the Merovingian chapel and built on the site the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre and he also founded The Royal Abbey of Montmartre, a monastery of the Benedictine order, whose buildings, gardens and fields occupied most of Montmartre. He also built a chapel, called the Martyrium, at the site where it was believed that Saint Denis had been decapitated. It became a pilgrimage site. In the 17th century, a priory called abbaye den bas was built at that site, the abbey was destroyed in 1790 during the French Revolution, and the convent demolished to make place for gypsum mines. The church of Saint-Pierre was saved, at the place where the chapel of the Martyrs was located, an oratory was built in 1855. By the 15th century, the north and northeast slopes of the hill were the site of a surrounded by vineyards, gardens and orchards of peach. The first mills were built on the slope in 1529, grinding wheat, barley. The siege eventually failed when a relief force approached and forced Henry to withdraw. In 1790, Montmartre was located just outside the limits of Paris and that year, under the revolutionary government of the National Constituent Assembly, it became the commune of Montmartre, with its town hall located on place du Tertre, site of the former abbey. The main businesses of the commune were wine making, stone quarries, the mining of gypsum had begun in the Gallo-Roman period, first in open air mines and then underground, and continued until 1860. The gypsum was cut into blocks, baked, then ground, sold as montmartarite, it was used for plaster, because of its resistance to fire and water
6.
Mardi Gras
–
Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday, reflecting the practice of the last night of eating richer, fatty foods before the ritual fasting of the Lenten season. Related popular practices are associated with Shrovetide celebrations before the fasting, in countries such as England, Mardi Gras is also known as Shrove Tuesday, which is derived from the word shrive, meaning confess. In many areas, the term Mardi Gras has come to mean the period of activity related to the celebratory events. In some American cities, it is now called Mardi Gras Day, the festival season varies from city to city, as some traditions, such as the one in New Orleans, Louisiana, consider Mardi Gras to stretch the entire period from Twelfth Night to Ash Wednesday. Others treat the final period before Ash Wednesday as the Mardi Gras. In earlier times, parades were held on New Years Day, Carnival is an important celebration in Anglican and Catholic European nations. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the week before Ash Wednesday is called Shrovetide and it has its popular celebratory aspects, as well. Pancakes and related fried breads or pastries made with sugar, fat, and eggs are traditionally consumed at this time in many parts of Latin America. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is an annual LGBT pride parade and festival in Sydney, Australia, attended by hundreds of thousands of people from around Australia and overseas. In the Belgian city of Binche, the Mardi Gras festival is one of the most important days of the year, around 1000 Gilles dance throughout the city from morning until past dusk, whilst traditional carnival songs play. In 2003, the Carnival of Binche was proclaimed one of the Masterpieces of the Oral, Carnival is the most famous Brazilian holiday. During this time, Brazil attracts 70% of its tourists, variations in carnival celebrations are observed throughout the multitude of Brazilian cities. Yet, a commonality observed among them is the incorporation of samba into the celebrations, the southeastern cities of Brazil have massive parades that take place in large sambadromes. The Rio Carnival is where two million people celebrate in the city, the city of Salvador holds a very large carnival celebration where millions of people celebrate the party in the streets of the city with a very big diversity of musical styles together. Cayman Mardi Gras has now been recognised as one of the national festivals. Celebrating the traditional Fat Tuesday, they also host a festive Monday Food Festival as well as an all day EDM Ash Wednesday, the event attracts thousands of attendees during the 3 day festival and includes a line up of international celebrities and performers. The Cayman Mardi Gras Festival is slowly becoming a major tourist attraction to the island nation, Carnaval de Barranquilla is Colombias Mardi Gras celebration. In 2003, it was proclaimed as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral, in the Czech Republic it is a folk tradition to celebrate Mardi Gras, which is called Masopust
