Things to do
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Cathédrale Notre-Dame-des-Doms d'Avignon
Romanesque, and older than the palace it now stands beside and is dwarfed by, with a gilded Virgin added to the tower in 1859 that is visible from most of the town. Two papal tombs are inside. It stands on the rock between the palace and the gardens, so most visits pass through it.
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Collection Lambert
Two eighteenth-century mansions given to contemporary art, from the collection a Paris dealer deposited with the city in 2000: minimal and conceptual work, Basquiat, Nan Goldin, video rooms. The courtyard cafe under the plane trees is a good lunch. It provides the counterweight to a town otherwise entirely medieval.
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Fort Saint-André
France built this on the hill opposite in the fourteenth century to watch the papal city across the river, and the twin drum towers at its gate are the image of the whole standoff. An abbey and a formal garden sit inside the walls. Villeneuve is a ten-minute drive or a walk over the modern bridge.
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Halles d'Avignon
Forty stalls under a concrete roof hung with a vertical garden by Patrick Blanc, which was the compromise after the building was judged an eyesore. Inside is the daily food market: Ventoux cheeses, Camargue rice, oysters eaten at the counter. Closed Monday, and the traders start packing up by half past one.
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Musée Calvet
A doctor left his cabinet to the town in 1810 and it grew into this: Egyptian and Greek antiquities, French painting from Vernet to Soutine, silverware and wrought iron, in a mansion with a garden of plane trees. Entry is free. The archaeology overflowed long ago into a separate building nearby.
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Musée du Petit Palais
A cardinal's residence on the cathedral square holding Italian painting of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, largely from the Campana collection: Siena and Florence, gold grounds, and a Botticelli Virgin. For anyone interested in what came before the Renaissance it is one of the strongest holdings in France, and it is usually quiet.
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Palais des papes
Bare defensive stone outside and painted hunting scenes within, raised in two campaigns from 1335 and among the largest Gothic buildings anywhere. Revolutionary barracks stripped most of the interior, so the rooms are shown empty and explained by a tablet given out at the door. The chapel and the pope's study are the parts that survived.
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Palais du Roure
A fifteenth-century Florentine merchant's house behind a studded door on a narrow street, bought in 1918 by a descendant of the poet Mistral and kept as a centre for Provençal language and culture. Courtyard, painted ceilings and a library. It is the least visited of the town's museums and the one that feels least arranged.
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Pont du Gard
Three tiers of dry-laid limestone carrying a Roman aqueduct across the Gardon at a height of forty-eight metres, built in the first century to bring water fifty kilometres to Nîmes. The channel fell by a few centimetres per kilometre over that distance. Swimming is allowed from the shingle below and the site opens early.
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Pont Saint-Bénézet
Four arches of a crossing that once had twenty-two and reached the far bank, abandoned in the seventeenth century after the Rhône took out spans faster than they could be rebuilt. The song puts the dancing on the bridge. It happened underneath, on the island in the river.
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Remparts d'Avignon
Four kilometres of wall, thirty-nine towers and seven gates, thrown up by the popes in the fourteenth century and restored by Viollet-le-Duc, who left off the moat, so they look lower than they were meant to. The circuit is unbroken and still encloses the whole old town, which few French cities can claim.
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Rocher des Doms
The limestone outcrop the town began on, laid out as a garden in the nineteenth century with a duck pond, cedars and a terrace over the river. From the parapet the broken bridge, the island and Villeneuve on the far bank line up in one view. Free, open late in summer, and the best hour is the last one.