Parisian nocturnes: Slipping into the aquarium
- Nour Azzalini
- Jul 6, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 7, 2025
Note to the reader - this post is best enjoyed with the recommended playlist
In 2000, Italian author Tiziano Scarpa published Venezia è un pesce. Subsequently anglicised as Venice is a Fish: A Sensual Guide, the book takes its readers on a sensory tour of the floating city. Feet, Legs, Heart, Hands, Face, Ears, Mouth, Nose, and Eyes — each chapter reimagines how one might come to know Venice through the body, perhaps offering a guide best suited to cultivating an emotional connection.
Fresh out of my studies, I had picked up a well-preserved copy at a local Oxfam upon returning to my home city of Paris.
After fifteen years as an immigrant in southern England — years marked by an intensified feeling of otherness, particularly as I became more immersed in pandemic-time British academia — I returned, lulled by the patina of childhood nostalgia. In the months that followed, severed heartstrings gave way to the natural evolution from temporary to permanent, and I set about reacquainting myself with the foreign yet familiar, as that first autumn gradually hardened into winter.
But let us return to Scarpa’s work.
If Venice is a fish, then Paris is an aquarium.
If Venice is to be explored on foot or through its winding canals, then Paris should be savoured by foot, by bike, or by metro.
Do away with cars — or their equivalents. Densely populated and choked with traffic, they’ll get you nowhere, except perhaps closer to the not-so-unique but ultimately authentic experience of Parisian road rage. An inclusive phenomenon, it is practised by motorists and pedestrians alike.
While internationally recognised as beautiful by day, it is at night that Paris reveals itself — Paris la lumineuse: for light cannot shine without darkness.
It is then that everything unfolds. The concrete jungle metamorphoses; Saint-Saëns’ kaleidoscope of melancholy becomes infused with the pulse of a multicultural metropolis. Music collides with the lively chatter of terrasses, carried by its inhabitants — shaped by increasing globalisation and a historic, if distasteful, French penchant for colonisation.
In the summer, this is only magnified. As the days lengthen and temperatures rise, Parisians scuttle hastily, fleeing increasingly unbearable heat — the result of an unfortunate cocktail of worsening climate crisis, concrete, and a notable lack of greenery. 40 on the rocks as one could call it.
[For fear of making this post sound like a perfume commercial, the author apologises in advance]
But Paris is like a perfume — not least because of the country’s widespread appreciation for this highly consumed cosmetic product.
At the top of the olfactory pyramid: the quintessential Haussmannian façade, made iconic by France’s large-scale tourism industry. (Did you know the country ranks as the most visited in the world, with 90 million visitors in 2024 alone?) Light, fresh, and easily acquired — an effortlessly digestible first impression.
But what of the heart and base notes? Perhaps less palatable — more raw, more abrupt — as one delves deeper into the city’s tightly packed innards, wrapped like a shell from the first to the twentieth arrondissement.
Take Porte d’Orléans, for example. Paris’ southernmost entryway. The main boulevard offers little at first glance: retail shops, épiceries, and shoddy cafés or bar PMUs with tacky American décor, all garnished with soot from the neighbouring périphérique — the arterial roundabout of traffic connecting the banlieues of the petite and grande couronne to Paris intra muros.
Easily dismissible — and understandably so. To the average tourist, such a place is a zone of passage: a transfer point on metro line 4, headed toward the city centre — Denfert-Rochereau, Montparnasse, Châtelet–Les Halles, Gare du Nord. Few will venture further out.
But before rushing off to the Catacombs, the nearest museum, or whatever monument comes to mind, stay a while — for it is in such places that one gets to know Paris. The everyday places. The common places. The quiet and loud places.
With their peeling millefeuille of posters, cigarette butts, and kids screaming in glee as they run ahead of their parents. With the uncles and aunties buying yam at the African grocer’s, sandwiched between a dingy bar and the kebab shop next door. With the vendeurs à la sauvette grilling corn beside the bus terminal, as the uncle in a djellaba waits patiently for the bus 38 to take him up the avenue.
And then, look beyond.
Paris is not a city best understood through an organised checklist of sites. To do so is to settle for the most simplistic, mono-faceted reflection of the city — the top note without the heart nor the base.
Take a plunge into its many side streets. Quieter than the grand boulevards, they are often curved and diagonal, lined with platanes — the curse of hayfever season and to the humble cyclist (se ki sav sav).
As you delve deeper, you may come upon a quiet café, a plaza, a hidden park. Facades with bas-reliefs of men straining under balconies. A fontaine Wallace offering drinking water to all.
Going further, you might reach the Seine — but not by the direct route.
Instead, slip through the 13th arrondissement: Avenue Tolbiac, Butte-aux-Cailles, Boulevard Saint-Jacques — before cutting into the cinquième, along Rue Monge, and passing by the Grande Mosquée de Paris. If you linger around the west side of the block, you may come across a fountain — a figure carved in stone, water gushing from its open mouth. Take the road that slopes downward: on your left, a façade of wisterias towering over a courtyard scented with jasmin.
As you slope down the streets, inching closer to the Seine, with its Jardin Tino Rossi bubbling with the rhythms of Cuba, Colombia, La República Dominicana fusing with derbouka and djembé, you might wonder why I’ve taken you on such a detour. But the answer is simple: just like a perfume becomes unique to each wearer, let Paris get under your skin, as each layer peels back, again and again.
Nour Azzalini - June 2025
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