Paris intrigues, astonishes, provokes, overwhelms, and ultimately gets under your skin. The City of Light is the apex of architectural beauty, artistic expression, and culinary delight, and it knows it. As drop-dead arrogant as the Arc de Triomphe, as disarmingly quaint as a lace-curtain bistro, it seduces newcomers with a Latin-lover style -- and its subtle siren song invites unhurried exploration.

Paris is a city of vast, noble perspectives and intimate, ramshackle streets, of formal espaces verts (green open spaces) and of quiet squares. This combination of the pompous and the private is one of the secrets of its perennial pull. Another is its size. Paris is relatively small as capitals go, with distances between many of its major sights and museums invariably walkable.

For the first-timer there will always be several must-dos at the top of the list, but a visit to Paris will never be quite as simple as a quick look at Notre-Dame, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower. You'll discover that around every corner, down every ruelle (little street) lies a resonance-in-wait.

You can stand on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré at the very spot Edmond Rostand set Ragueneau's pastry shop in Cyrano de Bergerac. You can read the letters of Madame de Sévigné in her actual hôtel particulier, or private mansion, now the Musée Carnavalet. You can breathe in the fumes of hubris before the extravagant onyx tomb Napoléon designed for himself. You can gaze through the gates at the school where Voltaire honed his wit and lay a garland on Oscar Wilde's grave at Père Lachaise.

If this is your first trip, there's no harm in taking a guided tour of the city -- a perfectly good introduction that will help you get your bearings and provide you with a general impression before you return to explore at leisure the sights that particularly interest you. By the time you have explored the city, you should not only have had your cultural fill but be downright exhausted and hungry, too.