Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital

The Pitié-Salpêtrière is defined by a massive, domed baroque chapel that anchors a sprawling, ninety-acre medical complex in the thirteenth arrondissement. Built between sixteen sixty and sixteen eighty on the site of a former gunpowder factory, the name itself comes from the French word for saltpeter, a key ingredient in explosives. Originally commissioned by Louis the Fourteenth, the site functioned not as a place of healing but as a vast repository for thousands of beggars, orphans, and people considered social outcasts.