Founded in 1257 as a college of theology, the Sorbonne is the institution that gave the Latin Quarter its name — for centuries its students and scholars conversed in Latin — and still gives it its character. The grand seventeenth-century buildings around the Place de la Sorbonne, dominated by the domed chapel built for Cardinal Richelieu (who is buried inside), remain the symbolic heart of French academic life.
The working university is not generally open to casual visitors, but the café-lined square in front is a fine place to sit with a coffee and watch the students, and the surrounding streets are dense with the bookshops and cheap eateries that follow a university everywhere. It was here that the May 1968 protests began.