La Maison Rose sits at the corner of Rue de l'Abreuvoir and Rue des Saules. Its pink walls are so firmly part of Montmartre's identity that when an owner painted them white in 1970, the experiment was promptly reversed.

The café dates to 1905, when Catalan painter Ramon Pichot and his wife Germaine opened it as a cheap canteen for the neighbourhood's artists. Germaine was no minor figure: she was the woman whose romantic rejection of Picasso's friend Carlos Casagemas ended with a gunshot in a nearby café.

An event widely credited with triggering Picasso's Blue Period. Despite that history, Picasso kept coming back for lunch. Dalí, Modigliani and Albert Camus all pulled up chairs here, and Maurice Utrillo painted the building so often he practically made it his muse.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace these tangled artistic relationships as they wind through Montmartre's cobbled lanes, connecting the pink façade to Picasso's early tragedies and the bohemian circle that shaped modern art.