The East of the Left Bank
Realising my time in Paris would likely be cut short thanks to COVID-19, whenever the weather was good I prioritised seeing as much as the city as I could!
One day I decided I would walk from my home in the 14th to the Mitterand Library via Place d'Italie. Which is a considerable walk, and took most of the afternoon – but I did see many different parts of Paris that a tourist wouldn't necessarily visit.
The Butte-aux-Cailles close to Place d'Italie is a really cute area with plenty of cafés and restaurants in a sort of village atmosphere. In other circumstances I would've loved to have spent some time checking out some of the cafés.
The Place d'Italie is a suprisingly modernised area, and seems to mark the boundary between the more Haussmanian areas of the city and those that are filled with more late 20th century towers.
Passing through the Place and towards La Seine, I walked around the Mitterand National Library complex, which consists of four L shaped towers and was one of the Socialist President Mitterand's grand architectural projects.
Another of Mitterand's projects is across the Seine, the Ministry of Finance, also known as Bercy (on the right of the picture below, the sheer size of the structure isn't very clear though)
