Jardin de l'Observatoire de Paris

A long, symmetrical path cuts through the center of the Jardin de l'Observatoire, framed by rows of tightly clipped linden trees. This garden stretches toward the white stone facade of the Paris Observatory, the oldest active astronomical observatory in the world. King Louis the Fourteenth commissioned the building in sixteen sixty-seven, and within its walls, astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovered the gap in Saturn's rings. The garden serves as the quiet, geometric foreground to three centuries of mapping the stars above the city.