In January we also went to the Panthéon, the beautiful Neoclassical building that is tucked away in the 5th arrondissement near the Sorbonne, whose dome can be seen from many parts of Paris. It was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, whose prayers and exhortations to the people of Paris to stay and fight were said to have saved Paris by diverting Attila's Huns away from the city. But after the Revolution it was taken over by the National Constituent Assembly and renamed the Panthéon, to become a mausoleum for distinguished Frenchmen, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Marie Curie, Louis Braille, Alexander Dumas (père), and of course Soufflot, the Panthéon's architect. It's one of the most important monuments in Paris.
A copy of Foucault's pendulum, which he used to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth, is also permanently displayed at the Pantheon.
On one side of the church are the steps that face Rue de la Montagne Sainte Genevieve, the street that was inmortalized in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. This is where Owen Wilson's character is picked up after midnight and taken back in time.
