Explore the real places in New York City that appear in Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Giovanni's Room, Guillaume's Bar, Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, Palais Royal Gardens and 8 more.
Rue de Sèvres, 6th arrondissement — The fatal interior
This cramped, cluttered room in a courtyard off the Rue de Sèvres is the novel's moral and physical center. David moves in with Giovanni after their first night together, and their love — passionate, desperate, claustrophobic — unfolds within its disordered walls. Giovanni cannot bring himself to clean or organize it, as though the room embodies the chaos he cannot escape. David later abandons both Giovanni and the room, fleeing back toward Hella and the respectable life he believes he wants. The room becomes a symbol of everything David refuses to claim.
The 6th arrondissement, on the Left Bank, was the heart of postwar bohemian Paris — home to writers, painters, and expatriates who gathered in its narrow streets and courtyard apartments. Such chambres de bonne and tiny rented rooms were common lodgings for the working poor and artists alike.
The Rue de Sèvres remains a lively Left Bank street near the Bon Marché department store. The area retains much of its postwar character, though rents have risen dramatically and the bohemian population has largely given way to affluent Parisians.
Near Les Halles, 1st arrondissement — Where David meets Giovanni
Guillaume's bar is where David first lays eyes on Giovanni, who works there as a bartender. Guillaume himself is a corpulent, predatory older gay man who runs the bar as a kind of social theater for Paris's gay underground. It is here, amid the noise and theater of the bar, that David and Giovanni begin their charged, wordless exchange that will end in love, ruin, and murder. Guillaume later becomes Giovanni's victim when, after firing him, he attempts to exploit him sexually.
The area around Les Halles was Paris's central market district for centuries, a working-class neighborhood full of cheap restaurants, bars, and night workers. By the 1950s it had become known for a subterranean gay nightlife that operated in semi-secrecy.
Les Halles was demolished in 1971 and replaced by the Forum des Halles shopping center. The neighborhood has been extensively redeveloped, though traces of its older character survive in surrounding streets like Rue Saint-Denis.
172 Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés — Expatriate gathering place
The cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés form the social world of the American expatriates David moves among. David drifts through these spaces with his friend Jacques, the older Belgian-American man who introduces him to Guillaume's bar and, indirectly, to Giovanni. These cafés represent the life David believes he leads — intellectual, detached, cosmopolitan — as opposed to the passionate entanglement he falls into with Giovanni.
The Café de Flore opened in the 1880s and became the preferred haunt of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, and the existentialist circle in the postwar years. It was the spiritual center of Left Bank intellectual life in the 1940s and 1950s, the exact period Baldwin's novel is set.
Café de Flore continues to operate at the same address and remains one of Paris's most celebrated literary cafés. It is a tourist landmark and a working café, hosting writers and artists alongside sightseers. It appears on virtually every literary Paris tour.
Visit: Café de Flore (landmark)
6 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés — The expatriate milieu
David inhabits the world of Paris cafés as a way of performing a certain kind of American freedom — the freedom of the expatriate who has left behind his country but not yet found himself. Jacques and David meet in places like this, and it is Jacques who first encourages David to abandon his careful self-deception and admit what he feels for Giovanni. These café conversations form the philosophical spine of the novel, where questions of identity, desire, and cowardice are debated against the backdrop of postwar Parisian life.
Les Deux Magots, named after two Chinese figurines inside, became one of Paris's most famous literary cafés, frequented by Hemingway, Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Baldwin himself during his years in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Les Deux Magots remains open and is one of Paris's most visited cafés. It awards an annual literary prize, the Prix des Deux Magots, established in 1933. It sits directly across from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Visit: Les Deux Magots (landmark)
Place du Palais Royal, 1st arrondissement — The city David wanders
David wanders through Paris in a state of anguished self-examination throughout the novel, and the formal gardens and arcades of central Paris form the backdrop to his restless interior monologue. As he moves through the city, he rehearses his memories of Giovanni, his betrayal, and his inability to accept who he is. Baldwin uses Paris's public spaces not as sites of action but as mirrors of David's conscience — beautiful, indifferent, and inescapable.
The Palais Royal was built in the 17th century as Cardinal Richelieu's residence and later became a center of Parisian social and political life. Its galleries and gardens were historically associated with clandestine encounters and underground commerce, including in the 18th and 19th centuries, a well-known gay meeting ground.
The Palais Royal gardens are a beloved public park in central Paris, freely accessible. The colonnaded arcades house boutiques and restaurants. Daniel Buren's striped columns in the courtyard, installed in 1986, are a contemporary landmark.
Visit: Jardins du Palais Royal (park)
Place du Havre, 8th arrondissement — Hella returns from Spain
Hella Lincoln, David's American fiancée, returns to Paris from Spain at a station like Gare Saint-Lazare, expecting to find the conventional future she and David have discussed. Her return forces David into a crisis of duplicity — he must pretend, even more desperately, to be the man she believes him to be, while his love for Giovanni has already irreversibly transformed him. The arrival represents the collision of David's two worlds, and the beginning of his greatest betrayal of both Hella and Giovanni.
Gare Saint-Lazare, opened in 1837, is Paris's oldest and one of its busiest rail terminals. It connected Paris to Normandy and to the Channel ports, and served as the arrival point for countless travelers from Britain and beyond. It was immortalized by Monet in his series of paintings of the station in 1877.
Gare Saint-Lazare remains one of Paris's major rail hubs, serving millions of commuters annually. The station has been modernized but retains its grand 19th-century iron-and-glass structure. Monet's paintings of it hang in the Musée d'Orsay.
Visit: Gare Saint-Lazare (landmark)
Quai Anatole France, 7th arrondissement — David walks the river
The banks of the Seine recur throughout Baldwin's Paris as the landscape through which David moves in his profound loneliness. He walks along the river at night and in the early morning, tormented by memories of Giovanni and by the knowledge of what his abandonment has cost them both. The Seine in the novel functions as a kind of temporal river — David's present is always slipping into his past, and the water's indifferent flow mirrors his inability to halt or reverse what he has done.
The quais of the Seine have been the symbolic heart of Paris for centuries. The Left Bank quais in particular became associated with bohemian and intellectual life in the 20th century, lined with the famous bouquinistes — secondhand book sellers — whose green stalls have operated there since the 16th century.
The Seine riverbanks on both sides are popular walking destinations and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The bouquinistes continue to operate. The Berges de Seine, a riverside park created on reclaimed roadway, draws Parisians and tourists alike.
Visit: Les Berges de Seine (park)
42 Rue de la Santé, 14th arrondissement — Giovanni awaits execution
Giovanni is held at La Santé after being convicted of Guillaume's murder. As David learns of Giovanni's fate — arrest, trial, and the guillotine — the prison becomes the novel's most terrible fixed point. David cannot bring himself to visit Giovanni in prison, another act of cowardice that haunts him. The execution is the novel's off-page climax, the thing toward which everything has been moving, and La Santé is where Giovanni spends his final days, abandoned by the man who loved him.
La Santé Prison was built in 1867 and has been one of Paris's primary detention centers ever since. Its name — 'health' in French — is bitterly ironic, as it housed condemned prisoners and was the site of numerous executions, including by guillotine, through the mid-20th century. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
La Santé remains an active detention facility and is not open to the public. It underwent major renovation between 2014 and 2019. The surrounding 14th arrondissement is a quiet residential neighborhood with little outward sign of the prison's grim history.
11th/12th arrondissement — Symbol of Paris's violent history
Baldwin's Paris is saturated with the weight of French history, and the site of the old Bastille — where the Revolution began, where heads rolled — shadows the novel's preoccupation with justice, punishment, and state violence. Giovanni's approaching execution by guillotine cannot be separated from this tradition of French revolutionary punishment. The guillotine that will kill Giovanni is the same instrument that the Republic has always used to dispatch those it deems unfit to live.
The Bastille fortress was stormed on July 14, 1789, the symbolic beginning of the French Revolution. The prison was demolished shortly after. The July Column, erected in the 1840s, now stands at the center of the square to commemorate the Revolution of 1830, not 1789.
Place de la Bastille is a major traffic hub and public square at the junction of several arrondissements. The Opéra Bastille, inaugurated in 1989 for the Revolution's bicentennial, dominates one side. The square remains a traditional gathering point for political demonstrations.
Visit: Place de la Bastille (monument)
Near Montparnasse, 14th arrondissement — David's cheap lodgings
Before moving in with Giovanni, David lives in a series of modest Left Bank hotels of the kind that housed impecunious American expatriates in the 1950s. These anonymous rooms represent his suspension between two lives — he is neither fully committed to Hella and America nor willing to embrace what he feels for Giovanni. The cheap hotel room is where David stages his performance of the rootless but respectable young American abroad, the identity he clings to even as it disintegrates.
Montparnasse was the center of the American expatriate community in Paris from the 1920s onward. Cheap hotels and furnished rooms around the 14th arrondissement housed writers, artists, and students, many of whom subsisted on remittances or the GI Bill. Baldwin himself lived in such rooms when he first arrived in Paris in 1948.
The Montparnasse area retains many small hotels catering to budget travelers, though prices have risen considerably. The Tour Montparnasse and the Gare Montparnasse anchor the neighborhood. The literary and artistic associations of the area are commemorated in local cafés and plaques.
Boulevard Saint-Michel, 6th arrondissement — The Paris of false peace
The Luxembourg Gardens embody the composed, sunlit face of Paris that David inhabits as an expatriate — a city of beauty, formality, and surfaces. David and Hella walk in places like this when she returns from Spain, playing out the pantomime of their normal life together. But beneath the civility of the gardens, David is consumed by knowledge of Giovanni's coming death and his own role in it. Baldwin uses the formal beauty of Paris's public spaces to throw into relief the violence of David's interior landscape.
The Jardin du Luxembourg was created in 1612 for Marie de Médicis, who modeled the palace on the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The gardens were redesigned in the formal French style in the 17th century and have been a beloved public space ever since, particularly associated with the Latin Quarter student population.
The Jardin du Luxembourg is one of Paris's most popular parks, managed by the French Senate. It features a large octagonal pond, statues of French queens, tennis courts, beehives, and an orchard. It is freely accessible to the public and draws millions of visitors each year.
Visit: Jardin du Luxembourg (park)
Côte d'Azur — Where David and Hella flee and fall apart
After Giovanni's arrest, David and Hella retreat to the south of France — a borrowed house or rented villa in the countryside near Nice — in an attempt to reconstruct their relationship and their planned future. It is here that Hella finally sees David for what he is, catching him in an unmistakable moment of cruising or encounter, and understands that the life they planned is impossible. She leaves for America. David is left alone with the full weight of his choices as Giovanni's execution approaches.
The Côte d'Azur became a popular retreat for northern Europeans and Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1950s it was frequented by artists and writers — Picasso, Matisse, and many American expatriates — as well as by tourists drawn by the climate and the postwar sense of escape.
The Nice area and surrounding Provençal villages remain among France's most visited destinations. The city of Nice itself is a major cultural hub with fine museums including the Musée Matisse and Musée Marc Chagall. The surrounding hill towns retain much of their mid-century character.
Visit: Nice Old Town (Vieux-Nice) (historic site)
2 Avenue Gabriel, 8th arrondissement — America David cannot return to
The American Embassy stands at the edge of David's world in Paris as a symbol of the country and identity he has fled. David's expatriate status is bound up with his inability to live as a gay man in America — Paris offers him distance but not liberation, freedom but not honesty. The Embassy represents the America of convention, family expectation, and compulsory heterosexuality that has shaped David's self-loathing, and toward which Hella finally departs after discovering the truth about him.
The United States Embassy in Paris has occupied the building at 2 Avenue Gabriel, on the Place de la Concorde, since 1933. The 8th arrondissement address placed the Embassy at the heart of official Paris, adjacent to the Élysée Palace and the grand boulevards of the Right Bank.
The U.S. Embassy remains at this location, one of the most prominent diplomatic addresses in Europe. Due to security requirements, public access to the building is restricted. The surrounding area — Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the Tuileries — is among the most visited in Paris.
More by James Baldwin: All James Baldwin books
More novels set in Paris: Browse all Paris books on Map A Story
Other nearby maps: Patriot Games by Tom Clancy locations map · The Time Machine by H.G. Wells locations map · The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch locations map · The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle locations map