>>( remember *why* the boulevards in Paris are so wide <s> )
>
>So Napoleon could ride with his cavalry and pass under the Triumph gate?
No, so parading German troops wouldn't feel cramped ( oops, sorry, that just slipped out )
Actually, when Paris was pretty much completely rebuilt by Baron von Haussmann under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s a major consideration was to make barricades difficult and to make artillery and cavalry useful for urban crowd control <s>. Have to admit, though, created one of my favorite cities.
>OTOH, why are the streets so narrow all around the Mediterranean?
The narrow streets elsewhere around the Med are so when I'm driving the wrong way down a cobblestone street in Sienna I can't turn around and get to practice my Italian with a gun-toting carabinieri <s>
Charles Hankey
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
-- T. S. Eliot
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
- Ben Franklin
Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
