| Place d'Italie, the central junction of the 13e, is one of those Parisian roundabouts that takes half an hour to cross. On its north side is the ornate mairie of the arrondissement, while to the south is a new Gaumont cinema whose curving glass frontage cleverly advertises the giant screen within – the two are roughly the same size. In the 1848 Revolution, the place was barricaded and the scene of one short-lived victory of the Left. A government general and his officers were allowed through the barricades, only to be surrounded and dragged off to the police station, where the commander was persuaded to write an order of retreat and a letter promising three million francs for the poor of Paris. Needless to say, neither was honoured and reprisals were heavy. Many of those involved in the uprising were tanners, laundry-workers or dye-makers, with their workplace the banks of the River Bièvre. This area was deemed a health hazard and covered over in 1910 (creating rues Berbier-du-Mets and Croulebarbe) – the main source of pollution being the dyes from the Gobelins tapestry workshops, at 42 avenue des Gobelins, which had operated here for some four hundred years. On the guided tour (in French only; Tues–Thurs 2pm & 2.45pm; €8; M° Gobelins), you can watch tapestries being made by painfully slow traditional methods: each weaver completes between one and four square metres a year. The designs are now exactingly specified by contemporary artists, and almost all of the dozen or so works completed each year are destined for French government offices. An on-site museum is planned to open in 2005, displaying both old and contemporary tapestries. Hidden just north of Gobelins is an exquisite fairy-tale tower and gateway hemmed in by workshops and lockups. This is all that remains of the Château de la Reine Blanche, where the young Charles VI of France supposedly went mad after a riotous party in 1393 when he was nearly burnt alive. The tower and gate date from when the Château was rebuilt in the sixteenth century, and it is all currently being converted into luxury apartments. You can take a look through the courtyard at 4 rue Gustave-Geffroy. A stone's throw away, between rues Berbier and Corvisart, is a big public garden – although nothing very special, it's handy for a snooze or picnic if you're out this way. The ornate, bourgeois buildings between boulevards St-Marcel and Vincent-Auriol are dominated by the immense Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, built under Louis XIV to dispose of the dispossessed, and later used as a psychiatric hospital – today it's a general hospital. Jean Charcot, who believed that susceptibility to hypnosis proved hysteria, staged his theatrical demonstrations here, with Freud as one of his fascinated witnesses.
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