Cool Stuff in Paris: An unfinished statue of the Virgin Mary, buried for eight centuries
I'm not a religious dude, but I love churches; particularly very old and very European ones. Whenever I'm wandering in a part of Paris that's not super familiar to me, I always try to stop in every church I see. I'd never been in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés until recently, but I'm very glad I decided to stop in one afternoon while in the neighborhood to take pictures of the hotel where Oscar Wilde died. The abbey is gorgeous on the inside, but the one thing that really struck me is this 13-century statue of the Virgin Mary that's all the way in back. The statue is in pieces and visibly unfinished, reassembled from three fragments of rock discovered in an archeological dig in 1999. (Read more...)