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The 13th arrondissement is a middle and lower income residential district just south of the friendly communities of the Latin Quarter. It’s liveliest around Place D’Italie, a busy road junction that boasts a good handful of bars along the quiet, narrow streets that lead onto it, and on the Butte aux Cailles, a small hill just south west of the place with a lively residential community and a growing bar scene. The southern section of the arrondissement is home to Paris’ Chinatown - far from the city’s main tourist hot spots the long standing chinese community here is amongst the largest in Europe.

The Eastern, riverside quarters have shared in the redevelopment carried out across the water in the Twelfth. France’s new, high tech national library now stands on the water side, its four glass towers and underground warehouses filled with the nation’s books. A handful of bars and a swanky new cinema complex have grown up alongside it, including Batofar - a floating nightclub built into the hull of a rusting light-ship that caters well to the arty crowd drawn to what still seems a strangely quiet, faintly eerie urban redevelopment.

The thirteenth arrondissement now hosts Paris’ newest metro station, ‘Olympiades’, which stands at the end of Line 14 - by far the city’s fastest and most efficient metro line. The opening of the station in summer 2007 gave residents of the 13th ten minute access to the centre of the city, and ensures that the district can only rise in popularity.