Paris Montparnasse – Top of the city

The name Montparnasse has an origin that is far more literary than the steel and glass monolith you see today. In the seventeenth century, students from the nearby Latin Quarter gathered on a small, man-made hill formed by piles of rubble and construction debris. They jokingly christened the mound Mount Parnassus, after the sacred mountain in Greece that was home to the Muses in mythology. Though the rubble was eventually cleared to make way for city boulevards, the name persisted and eventually defined the entire district.