Tourist attractions in Paris : Jardin du Luxembourg
The Jardin du Luxembourg, or the Luxembourg Garden, is the second largest public park in Paris. A 22.5 hectares park known for its extraordinary public amenities, including fountains, sculpture, ponds, flowerbeds, tennis courts, pony rides, a marionette theater, playgrounds, food kiosks and open-air cafes.
In 1611, Marie de Medicis, the widow of Henry IV and the regent for the King Louis XIII decided to build a palace in imitation of the Pitti Palace in her native Florence. She purchased the hotel du Luxembourg (today the Petit-Luxembourg palace) and began construction of the new palace. She commissioned Salomon de Brosse to build the palace and a fountain, which still exists. In 1612 she planted 2,000 elm trees, and directed a series of gardeners, most notably Tommaso Francini, to build a park in the style she had known as a child in Florence. Francini planned two terraces with balustrades and parterres laid out along the axis of the chateau, aligned around a circular basin. In 1630 he designed the Medici Fountain to the east of the palace. It was in the form of a grotto, a popular feature of the Italian Renaissance garden.
In 1630 , Marie de Medicis bought additional land and enlarged the garden to thirty hectares, and entrusted the work to Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie, the manager of the royal gardens of Tuileries and the early garden of Versailles. He placed an octagonal basin with a fountain, with a perspective toward what is now the Paris observatory.
The Medici Fountain fell into ruins during the 18th century, but in 1811, at the command of Napoleon Bonaparte, it was restored by Jean Chalgrin, the architect of the Arc de Triomphe. Hidden behind the Medici Fountain is the Fontaine de Léda, (1807), a wall fountain built during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte at the corner of the Rue du Regard and Rue de Vaugirard, with a bas-relief sculpture depicting the legend of Leda and the Swan by Achille Valois, which was moved in 1866 to the Luxembourg Gardens and attached to the back of the Medici Fountain.
In 1865, during the reconstruction of Paris by the first President of the French Republic ,Louis Napoleon, the director of parks and promenades of Paris, Gabriel Davioud, built new ornamental gates and fences around the park, and polychrome brick garden houses. He also planted a fruit garden in the southwest corner. The garden in the late nineteenth century contained a marionette theater, a music kiosk. greenhouses, an orangerie also used for displaying sculpture and modern art (used until the 1930s), a rose garden and about seventy works of sculpture.
Text Source : wikipedia.org
