Eastern Paris

The areas to the north and east of the canal are also flourishing, around the rougher streets near Ménilmontant and Belleville, home to a small Chinatown (watch your purse and avoid wearing attention-getting jewelry). The city's largest cemetery, Père Lachaise, is here, with a roster of famous tenants including Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison. Not far away is the impressively wild Parc Buttes-Chaumont, with grassy fields, a small Greek-style temple, and sweeping hilltop views of Paris. It's a perfect place for a picnic lunch and to let museum-weary kids work off some steam. There are two other notable parks to the east: Parc de la Villette, which is also home to the city's well-regarded science museum, and the Bois de Vincennes.

Not far from the Bastille opera house, the Viaduc des Arts is a much-admired urban-renewal project that turned an old elevated rail line into arcaded design-focused studios and shops. Along the top, the Promenade Plantée makes for a lovely stroll through the 12e arrondissement, a nice middle-class neighborhood with stately apartment buildings and the pretty Square Trousseau, gateway to the Marché d'Aligre, one of the city's best covered markets. Come on Sunday morning with a shopping basket—or just your camera—when the vendors spill over into neighboring streets.

To the south of Bastille, the old wine warehouses at Bercy have been transformed into a veritable village of shops and restaurants bordering Park de Bercy. Directly across the Seine is the Bibliothéque National François Mitterand, the National Library of France, a sprawling complex of modern glass towers heralded as the world's most modern library when it opened in 1998.