The Jardin du Luxembourg began as a grieving queen's escape.

After Henri IV was assassinated in 1610, Marie de Medici bought a duke's property and built herself a palace far from the intrigues of the Louvre. She ruled as regent for her eight-year-old son, Louis XIII, but proved reluctant to hand over power. By his seventeenth birthday, each had raised an army against the other, and the young king exiled his mother from Paris.

The 60-acre garden now hosts France's Senate, a beekeeping school dating to 1856, and a miniature Statue of Liberty. Rose-ringed parakeets descended from birds that escaped airport cargo containers in 1974 sometimes flash green among the horse chestnuts.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace Hemingway's walks here to visit Gertrude Stein, explore the garden's role during the Liberation of Paris, and reveal how a Florentine queen's refuge became the Left Bank's way of life.