Palais des Papes

For most of the fourteenth century the centre of Western Christendom was not Rome but a rock above the Rhône. The papacy settled in Avignon in 1309, and over the following decades the popes turned an episcopal residence into the Palais des Papes, a fortress and court rolled into one and the largest Gothic palace in Europe, with some 15,000 square metres of floor space. Seen from the square below, it is a cliff of pale stone: sheer walls, deep pointed arches running up the facade and square towers, more castle than palace, built by men who needed to impress kings and keep out mercenary bands at the same time.

The building is really two palaces joined together. The austere Palais Vieux was raised under Benedict XII between 1334 and 1342 by the architect Pierre Poisson. His successor Clement VI, a lover of luxury, added the Palais Neuf, with grander halls, more ornament and the vast Great Chapel, about 52 metres long; work continued under Innocent VI and Urban V into the 1360s. Clement VI also called in painters, a team from across Europe led by Matteo Giovannetti of Viterbo, and fragments of their frescoes survive. The finest is the Chambre du Cerf, the pope's study, painted in 1343 with an unbroken woodland of hunting and fishing scenes, a stag hunt at its heart: a rare glimpse of secular court painting from the period, and an unexpectedly worldly room for a pope.

The papacy returned to Rome in 1377, but the palace's papal life did not end there: during the Western Schism rival popes installed themselves in Avignon, and the last held out in the building until 1403. Afterwards it declined into a provincial seat, was sacked during the French Revolution and then served for decades as a military barracks and prison, which stripped much of its decoration. It became a national museum in 1906. Today its empty, echoing halls are part of the experience; the scale is the point. In 1995 UNESCO inscribed the palace together with Avignon's cathedral ensemble and the broken medieval bridge of Saint-Bénezet.

Getting there

The palace stands in the heart of walled Avignon, a few minutes' walk from the Rhône and the Pont Saint-Bénezet. Avignon Centre railway station, just inside the walls, is about 1.4 km away, roughly a 15–20 minute walk; high-speed trains stop at Avignon TGV outside the city, linked to Avignon Centre by a short shuttle train. The nearest airport is Avignon-Provence Airport (AVN), about 9 km away.