Avignon

One of the largest Gothic buildings ever raised. Some twenty rooms are walked in a fixed sequence. Most stand empty, so the wall paintings and ceilings are what is left. A tablet or phone overlays how each room once looked.

The bridge once crossed the Rhone; of twenty-two arches four are left and it stops mid-river. Floods took an arch at a time until repairs stopped in the 17th century. Despite the song, one account puts the dancing under the bridge rather than on it.

The wall the popes raised still runs the whole way round the old centre. The moat was filled in and turned into a road, which makes the wall look lower than it was.

The rock beside the palace was turned into a garden, looking down on the river and the village across it. The city began on this rock, and the pond that once gave water is still there. A lift saves you the stairs.

Through July an invited programme and an open one that anyone may register for run side by side. The second numbers in the hundreds, so actors hand out flyers in the street. Posters go up in layers until it is hard to see which is today's.

The outside wall of the market hall is covered in plants, so no concrete shows. It is open mornings only, and past 1pm most of it is packed away. On Saturday morning a cook works the front, making dishes from what the stalls sold.

Across the river a French king built a fort on the hill facing the popes. From its tower the Avignon wall and the bridge fall into one frame.

Romans raised this three-tier aqueduct, and it lies forty minutes out of Avignon by car. The stones were cut to fit without mortar and have held for two thousand years. In summer the river below takes swimmers, and the shade sits on the left bank.

A river comes straight out of a pool at the foot of a cliff, thirty minutes from Avignon. In spring the pool fills and pours over like a waterfall; in summer the bed can show through. No diver has reached the bottom; a robot stopped at 308 metres in 1985.

Two 18th-century mansions were joined to hang contemporary art, so the mouldings and the works keep colliding.

Italian religious painting from the 13th to 16th centuries, hung in the former archbishop's palace closing the papal square to the north. A Virgin and Child by Botticelli is the best-known work. Far quieter than the Palais des Papes, it lets you linger.

A cobbled lane in plane-tree shade along the Sorgue canal, whose water served the workshops dyeing printed cotton. A few mossy wooden waterwheels still turn in the stream. Outside festival time it is the calmest street inside the walls.

A town wrapped in branches of the Sorgue, about 30 minutes from Avignon by train. Hundreds of antique dealers make it one of France's great antiques towns. On Sunday mornings a food market and antiques stalls line the water and the streets jam.

One of the few Roman theatres whose stage wall still stands almost whole; Louis XIV called it the finest wall in his kingdom. A statue of Augustus fills the niche at its centre. In summer the stage hosts an opera festival.

A Luberon hill village whose house walls glow from yellow to red with the ochre dug from its ground. The Sentier des Ocres through the old quarries is ticketed. The dust stains shoes and clothes red and resists washing, so leave pale clothes behind.

Cistercian monks settled this narrow valley below Gordes in 1148, and their abbey isstill lived in today. The lavender field before it turns purple in July, the very picture of Provence. It remains a place of prayer, so voices stay low inside.