The Wall of I Love Yous

The Wall of I Love Yous (Le Mur des je t'aime) is often called the most romantic artwork in Paris. This blue wall, one of France's best-known pieces of contemporary art, draws a steady stream of visitors to Montmartre. It carries 311 expressions of love in 250 languages. Alongside familiar ones like French and Chinese, it includes lesser-known languages too, all the way to Inuit, spoken by an Arctic people. About halfway along the left side, look for a hand symbol: it is the French sign-language gesture for "I love you."

The wall was created by Frédéric Baron. In 1992, dreaming of traveling the world, he poured that dream into this project. With his brother, he asked foreign neighbors how to write "I love you" in their languages and even visited embassies to collect more. They gathered a thousand expressions in more than 300 languages, and with the help of calligrapher Claire Kito, he transferred them onto tiles one by one. The finished wall is made of 612 tiles.

The red marks scattered across the wall are fragments of a broken heart. Put them together and they form one big heart, with each piece standing for a divided humanity. By engraving a shattered heart on the wall, the artist says, he wanted to join those pieces back together.