On Thursday, our class took a trip to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. So far, this has been my favorite class visit. The cemetery is the largest in Paris at 110 acres and contains 1,000,000 graves. Pere Lachaise is named after the confessor to Louis XIV. When e cemetery opened in 1804, there were only thirteen graves because it was too far away from the center of Paris and it was not blessed by the Catholic Church. So how to do you get more people to inhabit a cemetery. You move famous people there! Some of the worlds most famous icons are buried there including Delacroix, Jaques Louis-David, Edith Piaf, and Chopin. Even my professors grandparents are buried there. The thing I think that makes the cemetery so unique is that it has no religious affiliation; the Pere Lachaise cemetery is a place where people from all walks of life can come and meet as one. I also thoroughly enjoyed the architecture; there were Gothic, Classical, and Egyptian grave sites. Sometimes all the styles were combined into one site! The Pere Lachaise cemetery is hauntingly beautiful and romantic.
