We came  to the Passage des Panoramas for the restaurant, Passage 53, which we posted earlier here.

The Passage des Panoramas is a roofed commercial passageway located in the IIe arrondissement, of Paris between the Montmartre boulevard to the North and Saint-Marc street to the south.

According to Wikipedia:

It is one of the earliest venues of the Parisian philatelic trade, and it was one of the very first covered, airy commercial passageways in the world. Bazaars and souks in the Orient had roofed commercial passageways centuries earlier but the passage of Panoramas innovated in having glazed roofing and, later on, gas lights for illumination. It is thus the precursor to all the city gallerias of the 19th century and the covered suburban and city shopping malls of the 20th century.

It is hard to imagine this humble-looking passage evolved into the shopping malls of the world.  Think Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (see our post here) or the themed shopping malls of Macau- see our post here. There is a themed restaurant – named Victoria Station – in the Passage.

Not only is the history  of the Passage interesting – the shops are interesting too – where would one find such a high concentration of shops catered to the collectors of stamps and postcards ?  They buy and sell, and do valuations.

These philatelist’s stores are getting rarer these days as letters and stamps are slowly being replaced by electronic messages.

Stamps that are on sale ranges from the very old and rare to the fancifully-themed collections. For example this set of four stamps costs 3200 euros!

This sheet of commemorative stamps depicting the Tintin series of cartoons/comics (aka BD) is only 30 euros..

There are many other neat collections of stamps displayed in the windows.

Could any one of these stamp and postcard shops be an original store when the Passage opened?

Postcards!   Well, I(Chris) have a small collection of art postcards, including some early 1900’s commercial posters, like those on the left side of the photo.

May be I can sell some of my stamps and postcards for food !?

It is good to know that such a place exist where so many shops supporting the hobby of philately.

This is definitely, a fun place to look around.

In case you are interested in see more stamps, go here where we showed some British commemorative stamps for 2012 London Olympics.