Pont Alexandre III was built to celebrate a friendship between two empires, but the bridge itself nearly upstaged the relationship.

Completed for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, it honours Tsar Alexander III, who sealed the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1892. His son Nicholas II laid the foundation stone alongside French President Félix Faure. The two met again the following year in St Petersburg to lay the first stone for the Neva's Trinity Bridge, a reciprocal gesture now largely forgotten.

The engineering had to be as diplomatic as the politics: a single steel arch, just six metres high, so it wouldn't block the view between the Invalides and the Champs-Élysées. Thirteen sculptors decorated it with gilded Pegasus figures, cherubs and nymphs representing the Seine and the Neva.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the bridge's connections to the Belle Époque transformation of western Paris, linking it to the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais and the birth of the Métro, all products of the same 1900 ambition.