Avignon

Avignon

Avignon stands on a bend in the River Rhone, some 95 km (60 miles) north-west of Marseille. Despite its superb medieval monuments and its bridge made famous by the nursery rhyme, it is a thriving, energetic city rather than a museum piece.

Known as 'the city of the Popes', Avignon was a major papal city. In 1309 Clement V, a French pope, fled here from political turmoil in Rome. The third pope of Avignon, Benedict XII, began building the vast, fortified Palais des Papes in 1335 and it was finished by his successor, Clement VI a couple of decades later. It is divided by the Great Court - to one side of this the building is austere while to the other it retains visible evidence of the lavish, secular lifestyle of Clement VI. The palace was desecrated during the French Revolution, and its treasures looted, but the scale of the rooms with their frescoes and tiles shows how luxurious life was here.

Next to the palace stands the cathedral of Notre-Dame-des-Doms, a Romanesque building that was partially rebuilt in the fifteenth century. A short distance away is the Petit Palais, where the Pope and his entourage lived before the palace was built. This now contains an amazing collection of early Renaissance Italian art, including Botticelli's Virgin and Child.

From the town's low ramparts you can reach what is left of the Pont St-Benezet. It was built in the early fourteenth century, but collapsed and was mostly swept away by the river in the eighteenth century, but you can still walk, talk, dance and sing on what is left.