✈️ Paris (Not Your Typical Guide)
Street Art, Local Gems & No Touristy Fluff.
👋 Ciao, I’m Giulia Blocal, your street art insider. This is Beyond the Postcards, the travel side of Beyond the Walls, my long-running newsletter on street art, graffiti, off-the-beaten-path travel, and a bit of my life in between.
Each month, Beyond the Postcards takes us to a different city, diving into its street art scene and uncovering all those offbeat, overlooked places you won’t find in guidebooks (unless it’s one of mine 😉).
After Lisbon, Athens, and London, this month we land in Paris 🇫🇷 the city that became the protagonist of my first street art book, As Seen on the Streets of Paris.
Paris often presents itself as a finished image: grand façades, carefully framed views, the Seine sliding past monuments you already know by heart. Yet the city has always been shaped by friction. What appears composed and orderly above ground is matched by something restless, experimental, and unresolved beneath it.
More than other cities, Paris is built on the tension between a polished surface and a raw underground, sometimes quite literally, in a forbidden city below street level where subcultures have long found room to exist, as you’ll discover in this mini-guide.
Refinement and raw creativity coexist in Paris, traced not only in stone and architecture, but in spray paint. Hip hop culture, graffiti, and street art did not arrive as decoration, but as necessity, rooted in lived spaces and social tension, helping to pioneer these cultures in Europe. This undercurrent does not oppose the city’s elegance; it runs alongside it, subtly reshaping how the whole picture holds together.
I still stand by the saying that Paris is always a good idea. But an even better one is to move beyond the postcards and look for a different Paris, the one that rarely appears in guidebooks. Because Paris is at the forefront of multiple cultural scenes, you just need to know where to look.
And so, subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already, and let’s get started!
🇫🇷 In this Paris mini-guide you will find:
Paris’ Best Street Art Neighborhoods
My Favorite Museums & Art Galleries
Non-Touristy Spots You Shouldn’t Miss
Where to Eat & Drink Between Murals
My Interactive Paris Map
Books, Films, Podcasts, Music & Newsletters to Get in the Paris Mood
Paris’ Best Street Art Neighborhoods
