Oscar Wilde's Tomb — Père Lachaise

Oscar Wilde died broke and exiled in a Paris hotel in 1900, three years after release from Reading Gaol. His tomb in Père Lachaise has spent the century since becoming what his trials tried to prevent: a shrine. Jacob Epstein's monument — a massive modernist winged sphinx carved from a single twenty-ton block — was scandalous on arrival in 1912; officials briefly kept it under tarpaulin. Decades later a gentler scandal took over: so many pilgrims kissed the stone in lipstick that the grease began destroying the limestone, and in 2011 an Irish-funded restoration added the glass barrier you see today — now itself covered in kissed prints. Visiting: Père Lachaise is free, open roughly 8am-6pm; the tomb is in division 89, most easily reached from the Gambetta entrance. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas share a grave a few minutes' walk away in division 94 — do both. Come early, bring nothing but time, and read the epitaph from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: 'And alien tears will fill for him / Pity's long-broken urn.'