Before we set off for Barcelona we sped to the Madre de Deus Convent, which houses the Museu Nacional do Azulejo – the place where you head to see tiles and some of the most magnificent rooms in all of Portugal.

This is Pont des Arts … the foot bridge across the Seine from the Louvre where of late lovers place their love locks and then throw the key in the river.  If we had a real  pedestrian bridge in Perth, Kyle and Megan wouldn’t have had to travel so far …

Ken was here as well and I include his insights below: we certainly had similar feelings as we stood on the Pont – though we couldn’t help thinking Ken needed a few months in Ladakh to really get his head around civilisation.

“I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris. On the one side of the Seine is the harmonious, reasonable facade of the Institute of France, built as a college in about 1670. On the other bank is the Louvre, built continuously from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: classical architecture at its most splendid and assured. Just visible upstream is the Cathedral of Notre Dame –not perhaps the most lovable of cathedrals, but the most rigorously intellectual façade in the whole of Gothic art. […]

What is civilisation? I do not know. I can’t define it in abstract terms –yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it: and I am looking at it now.”  Sir Kenneth Clark, Civilization, 1969