The Polidor!

 There is a special place in Paris, frequented by the protagonists of La libraia che salvò i Libri, latest book on Shakespeare and Co. and it is called Polidor Restaurant.

Opened at first as a cheese store by Bléry Polidor later became a restaurant thanks to the intuition of Froissard. Intellectuals of all sorts have spent some time there. Julio Cortazar wrote on the Polidor an entire chapter in "Maquette à Monter": Roger Leenhardt mentioned Polidor when wrote a book on the post-war  atmosphere of Saint-Germain des Prés. 

Caricaturists like Cabu and Wolinski, painters as Perot and Botero enjoyed the Polidor.

Till the 19th century the restaurant has been frequented by artists. The pennieless poet Germain Nouveau is an example, but also intellectuals, politicians from the closest neighborhoods.

Now it's more than 175 years that the Polidor welcomes the students of La Sorbonne, intellectuals visitors, tourists. The people of the Collège de Pataphysique enjoyed to eat and discuss topics at the Polidor. Eugene Ionesco, René Clair, Paul Valéry, Robert Vian. Polidor has welcomed also other writers:  Rimbaud, Jean Jaures, Ernest Hemingway, who mentions the Polidor in his book "A Moveable Feast", James Joyce, André Gide. 

As writes someone: entering the Polidor it's like opening a door to History. 

What is, after all the Polidor if not a stop in the tumultuous existences of these men and women?

The restaurant has been also protagonist in several movies, but where the Polidor has played a big role was in Midnight in Paris, directed by Woody Allen, where a writer in search of inspiration, in his midnight walks in the french capital, enters in the past, meeting the most important protagonists of the 1920s: Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein...

Recently the restaurant welcomed some actors (Instagram page Ulysses100project) , fans of James Joyce, for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Ulysses, recreating a scenario only seen in 1922:

Polidor continues to be a temporal passport to the most beautiful and creative past seen in Paris.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Pictures from the Fb page of Polidor and Instagram page of @Ulysses100project.