Serge Gainsbourg Home — Rue de Verneuil, Paris

Serge Gainsbourg — born Lucien Ginsburg on April 2, 1928, in Paris — lived at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood from 1969 until his death in 1991, and the house has since become a permanent open-air gallery. Fans began painting the exterior walls with graffiti tributes immediately after his death, and the tradition has continued without interruption: the house is covered floor-to-ceiling in drawings, declarations of love, and reproductions of his lyrics and image, renewed constantly by new visitors. The owners have chosen not to remove it.

Gainsbourg was the most transgressive and intellectually restless figure in French popular music — a singer, songwriter, film director, and provocateur whose career spanned the chanson tradition, ye-yé pop, Caribbean reggae (his 1979 "Aux Armes et Cætera" used Jamaican musicians to reggae-ify the Marseillaise and caused a national scandal), and electronic experimentation. His collaborations with Brigitte Bardot and his long relationship with Jane Birkin produced some of his most celebrated and controversial work, including "Je t'aime... moi non plus" — a song banned by the BBC and briefly by the Vatican but a number-one hit across Europe.

The Rue de Verneuil house is not a formal museum — it remains in private hands — but the graffitied exterior functions as a living monument, visited daily by fans who add their own marks to the accumulated expression of collective admiration. Gainsbourg's grave at Montparnasse Cemetery is also heavily visited, often left with metro tickets and cigarettes — objects central to his persona. He died on March 2, 1991. His daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg has continued as an internationally acclaimed actress and recording artist.