Cinema was born in a café cellar near the opera

Haussmann's square converges seven streets on an opera house

You are standing at the Place de l'Opéra, the paved crossroads where the Boulevard des Capucines, the Boulevard des Italiens, the Avenue de l'Opéra, the Rue Auber, the Rue Halévy and the Rue de la Paix all converge. The square was carved out as part of Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of the city, laid down at the same time as the opera house it faces and named for it.

That opera house, the Palais Garnier, rises just to your northwest — a nineteen-hundred-seat theatre commissioned by Napoleon III and built to Charles Garnier's design between 1861 and 1875, so opulent that Parisians simply started calling it by the architect's name. Its library and museum, holding the archive of the Paris Opera, sits along the same block.

A few steps away stands the InterContinental, once the Grand Hôtel, opened in 1862 in the same Napoleon III style as the opera it faces. Its ground floor holds the Café de la Paix, designed by Alfred Armand, whose florid gilt interior and roll call of famous patrons have made it one of the most storied cafés in the world.

Below the pavement, the Opéra station carries three Métro lines and connects by tunnel all the way to Auber and the RER, a hidden warren under the square's marble entrances.

A basement café showed the world's first paying film

A short walk down the Boulevard des Capucines, in the basement of what was once the Grand Café, the Salon Indien du Grand Café hosted the first commercial screening of a motion picture on 28 December 1895 — the Lumière brothers' cinema was born in that cellar room.

Two blocks away on the Rue Daunou, Harry's New York Bar was converted from a bistro by the American jockey Tod Sloan in 1911 and became a magnet for expatriates through the First World War, later credited as the birthplace of several classic cocktails.

On the Boulevard des Capucines toward the Madeleine, the Théâtre des Capucines opened in 1889; the actress Arletty made her stage debut there in October 1919 and performed for a decade after. Nearby, the perfumer Fragonard has turned the same building's later incarnation into a private museum of scent.

Toward the Boulevard des Italiens, the Palais Berlitz went up in the 1930s on a block that had once held the Pavillon de Hanovre, later dismantled and rebuilt whole in a Paris suburb park.

West on the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin once stood the Hôtel Guimard, a neoclassical mansion built from 1770 to 1773 for the Opera dancer Marie-Madeleine Guimard, complete with its own 500-seat private theatre — swept away in Haussmann's demolitions. The Rue de la Paix, Paris, running south toward the Place Vendôme, became Paris's jewellers' row after Cartier opened there in 1898, and the first couture house on the street belonged to Charles Frederick Worth.

At the Rue Boudreau, the Théâtre de l'Athénée carries the legacy of Louis Jouvet, who directed it from 1934 to 1951, lending it the alternate name Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet. Close by, the earlier Éden-Théâtre, a 4,000-seat orientalist hall built in the early 1880s, was demolished in 1895.

Roman pottery and an ancient basin underlie the boulevards

Beyond the theatres and cafés, older ground shows through only in fragments: a site half a kilometre southeast has yielded Samian ware, the fine red pottery traded across the Roman world, marking Paris as a findspot of Gallo-Roman tableware. To the southwest, the Les Feuillants Convent once stood, a religious house long since absorbed into the modern street grid.

Underfoot, past the asphalt and the Métro tunnels, lies a shallow Cenozoic basin — siltstones, marls and claystones laid down between roughly 34 and 56 million years ago, capped by younger sands, gravels and clays. It is unremarkable stone for the eye, but it is the same soft Paris basin geology that made the city's building sands and gypsum quarries possible, and that lets its grand boulevards sit level and dry above the Seine's old floodplain.