Sixteen days from Paris to Bologna: south by train, and the food gets better at every stop

Paris began on this island, and three buildings on it will take an afternoon. Start with the Sainte-Chapelle, put up between 1238 and 1248 by Louis IX to hold what he had been sold as the Crown of Thorns, at a price several times what the building cost. The upper chapel is essentially a glass box: fifteen windows two storeys high, mostly thirteenth century glass, telling the Bible from Genesis round to the relic arriving in Paris. On a bright afternoon the effect is unreasonable.

Next door is the Conciergerie, which was the royal palace before it was the revolutionary prison. Marie-Antoinette spent her last ten weeks in a cell here in 1793. The great vaulted room downstairs, built to feed two thousand palace staff, is the oldest surviving Gothic hall in Europe and feels like the inside of a ship.

Finish at the cathedral, which reopened in December 2024 after the fire and five years of work. The stone has been cleaned back to a pale honey colour nobody alive had seen, and entry is free, though a timed slot booked in advance saves an hour of queue.

The Louvre was a fortress, then a palace, then in 1793 the revolutionary government opened it to the public as a museum. Thirty five thousand objects are on display and nobody sees them. Pick two wings, or one department, and accept the rest. The Egyptian collection, the Near Eastern rooms with the Code of Hammurabi, and the Italian painting gallery are three good answers. Go at opening or in the evening on a late night, and enter by the Carrousel or the Richelieu passage rather than the pyramid.

Come out into the Tuileries, laid out by Le Notre in the 1660s for a palace that burned down in 1871 and was never rebuilt, which is why the gardens now end in nothing. There are green metal chairs by the ponds and you are meant to move them.

At the far corner is the Orangerie, and it is the better museum of the two. Monet gave the state eight enormous water lily canvases in 1922 on condition they were shown as he specified: two oval rooms, natural light, no furniture, the paintings running continuously round the walls. They were installed in 1927, a few months after he died. Downstairs there is a dealer's collection of Cezanne, Renoir and Soutine, which most people are too stunned to look at properly.

The Gare d'Orsay was built for the 1900 exposition, went out of use because its platforms were too short for modern trains, and was nearly demolished before somebody realised that a glass-roofed hall was already a gallery. It opened as a museum in 1986 and holds the best Impressionist collection anywhere: Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh's self portrait, Courbet's enormous studio. Start on the top floor, where the Impressionists are, and work down.

Walk west to the Hotel Biron, an early eighteenth century mansion that Rodin rented rooms in from 1908 and eventually gave to the state on the condition it became his museum. The garden matters as much as the house: the Thinker, the Burghers of Calais and the Gates of Hell are all outside among the roses and clipped hedges, and there is a cafe under the trees.

Then the tower. It went up between 1887 and 1889 for the world's fair, was supposed to be dismantled after twenty years, and survived because the army found it useful for radio. Book the lift weeks ahead, or climb the stairs to the second floor, which costs half as much, has no queue and is where the view is actually best. Go for the last hour of daylight and stay for the hourly sparkle after dark.

The Marais was the aristocratic quarter before the court moved to Versailles, and its mansions stayed because it became a poor district and nobody could afford to knock them down. Place des Vosges, finished in 1612, is the oldest planned square in the city: thirty six identical pavilions of pink brick and stone over an arcade, with a gravel garden in the middle. Victor Hugo lived at number six and his flat is a free museum.

Five minutes north, the city's own history museum occupies two mansions and tells the story of Paris from prehistory to now, room by room, with reconstructed shopfronts, revolutionary relics and Proust's bedroom. The permanent collection is free and it is the most enjoyable museum in the city.

In the afternoon take the metro east to Pere Lachaise, opened in 1804 on what was then a hillside outside Paris. It was unpopular until the city moved the remains of Moliere and La Fontaine here as a marketing exercise, at which point everybody wanted in. Forty four hectares, cobbled avenues under chestnut trees, and Chopin, Wilde, Piaf, Balzac and Jim Morrison all somewhere in it. Take a map at the gate.

An hour and forty minutes from the Gare de Lyon puts you in the middle of Dijon. The ducal palace occupies one side of a semicircular square laid out in the 1680s, and most of it is the town hall, but the eastern wing holds one of the oldest museums in France, opened in 1787, six years before the Louvre.

The room to head for is the old ducal guard room, which contains the tombs of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless. Around the base of each runs a procession of alabaster mourners about forty centimetres high, each one carved individually, hooded, weeping, reading or simply staring, and the effect of eighty small figures in a stone cloister is far stranger and better than any photograph suggests. The rest of the museum is free and very good, and there is a ducal tower behind it that you can climb for the rooftops.

In the evening, walk two streets to Notre-Dame, a thirteenth century church with a facade of false gargoyles stacked in rows. On the corner of the north wall there is a small worn owl carved in the stone, which people have rubbed with their left hand for luck for so long that it has almost no features left. On the roof, an automaton clock struck the hours; Philip the Bold took it from Kortrijk in 1382 as war booty and had it carried here on a cart.

Dijon's covered market is iron and glass, finished in 1875, and trades on four mornings a week, Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday. Burgundy is a serious agricultural region and it shows: Charolais beef, Bresse chicken, snails, twenty kinds of goat cheese, and mustard sold from tubs rather than jars. Buy lunch here.

Ten minutes west, Saint-Benigne looks like a large Gothic parish church and its interest is underneath. The crypt is the surviving lower level of a rotunda built between 1001 and 1018 around the tomb of a martyr, three concentric rings of squat columns with carved capitals, lit by very little. It is one of the oldest interiors in France that you can stand inside.

In the afternoon take the tram out to the site of the Chartreuse de Champmol, the ducal burial monastery, which was destroyed at the Revolution and is now the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. Two things survive: a carved portal, and the Well of Moses, a hexagonal base carved by Claus Sluter between 1395 and 1403 with six prophets around it, life size, each with a different face and a different weight of cloth. It was the pedestal for a crucifix that has gone. Sluter's realism arrives about a century before anybody expects it.

Two hours south east, the train climbs out of the Burgundy plain into the folded limestone of the Jura, runs through pine and pasture, and then drops without warning onto Lake Geneva with the French Alps standing on the far shore. Sit on the right.

Lausanne is stacked up a hillside, and the first thing to work out is the metro, which is really a funicular railway pretending: it climbs from the port at Ouchy to the top of the town at a gradient no ordinary metro would attempt, and it is how you avoid an unpleasant amount of walking uphill.

The cathedral is at the summit, consecrated in 1275, the biggest Gothic building in the country, with a painted porch where the original thirteenth century colour has been restored. Since 1405 a watchman has called the hours from the belfry between ten at night and two in the morning, in four directions, without a break; it survived the Reformation, both wars and the invention of the fire alarm. Below it, the Palais de Rumine is a Florentine palace built in 1906 out of a bequest and packed with four cantonal museums at once, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and free on the first Saturday of the month.

In 1945 Jean Dubuffet started collecting work made by psychiatric patients, prisoners, mediums and recluses, people with no art education and usually no audience, and coined a name for it. He gave the collection to Lausanne in 1971 and it opened in a chateau on the northern edge of town in 1976. It is unlike any other museum: obsessive embroideries, drawings on both sides of scavenged paper, a cathedral built from cigarette packets, all with the maker's story on the label. It is uncomfortable and it stays with you for years.

Take the metro down to Ouchy in the afternoon, where the town meets the water and turns into a resort of plane trees, swans and boat piers. The Olympic Museum is on the slope above: Lausanne has been the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee since 1915, and the museum is better than that fact would predict, with a park of sculpture running down to the shore.

Then take a boat. The paddle steamers on this lake are a genuine fleet of restored Belle Epoque vessels, and even a short crossing to the French side and back gives you the whole terraced hillside of vines behind the town.

This is the long day and it is worth staying awake for. The train runs east along the lake through the vineyard terraces, turns up the Rhone valley past Sion and Brig, and then goes under the Alps in the Simplon tunnel, twenty kilometres of it, opened in 1906 and the longest railway tunnel in the world for most of the century that followed. You go in speaking French and come out in Domodossola with everybody speaking Italian, then drop down to Lake Maggiore and across the plain to Milan. Change there for Bergamo.

Bergamo's upper town sits on a hill above the modern city and the funicular from the bottom has been running since 1887. Arrive in the late afternoon, drop the bags and walk out into Piazza Vecchia, which is a single Renaissance square with a medieval town hall on one side, an eighteenth century library on the other and a fountain with stone lions in the middle. It gets called the perfect square often enough to be a cliche, and standing in it the cliche holds.

For the last of the light, take the second funicular from the western gate up to San Vigilio, a village on the ridge above with a ruined castle at the top and a terrace looking over the whole thing: the walls, the roofs, the plain running south to Milan, and the Alps behind you.

Off Piazza Vecchia, through an arch, is a second square with three buildings crushed against each other. Santa Maria Maggiore is twelfth century outside and violently Baroque inside, hung with Flemish tapestries and lined with wooden inlay designed by Lorenzo Lotto, who spent twelve years in this town. Donizetti, who was born here in 1797, is buried in the north aisle.

Attached to its flank is the Colleoni Chapel, put up in the 1470s by a mercenary captain who wanted a mausoleum and demolished the church sacristy to get the site. The front is a mosaic of rose, white and black marble worked into medallions, columns and figures, and the effect is somewhere between a jewel box and a wedding cake. Inside there is his gilded equestrian statue over the tomb, and a ceiling by Tiepolo.

The afternoon is for the Accademia Carrara, ten minutes downhill, founded in 1796 out of a private bequest and one of the best small collections in Italy: Pisanello, Bellini, Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Titian, and a room of Lotto that explains why the town claims him. It reopened after a long restoration and is now well lit and sensibly hung, which is not always true of Italian galleries.

Back through Milan and out onto the plain, a bit over two hours to Parma, most of it flat, straight and agricultural. This is the Po valley, where the fog sits all winter and the food is the richest in Italy, and the two facts are related.

Walk into the cathedral square, which is one of the great medieval spaces in Europe and almost always empty. On one side the cathedral, Romanesque, twelfth century, with an Antelami relief of the Deposition inside the south transept. On the other the baptistery: an octagon of pink Verona marble begun in 1196, four storeys of open arcading and nothing else like it, with Antelami's carved months and seasons running round the interior and a painted dome of blue and gold above them. It is the single most beautiful building on this entire route.

Then go back into the cathedral and look up. Between 1526 and 1530 Correggio painted the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome: a spiral of legs, clouds and foreshortened bodies rising into light, with no floor to it at all. A contemporary canon called it a hash of frogs. Every ceiling painted in Italy for the next two centuries came out of it.

The Palazzo della Pilotta is a huge unfinished brick block the Farnese dukes built in the sixteenth century and never faced, and it holds three things. The Teatro Farnese is a wooden theatre of 1618, built entirely of timber inside a hall, with a horseshoe of tiered seating and a stage that could be flooded for naval battles. It was used about nine times, was destroyed by a bomb in 1944 and rebuilt from the fragments and the drawings. Standing in it is like being inside a violin.

Behind it, the Galleria Nazionale runs from Byzantine panels through Correggio and Parmigianino to Canaletto and El Greco, and the archaeological museum next door has the finds from the Roman and Etruscan sites of the plain.

In the afternoon, five minutes away, is a room most visitors miss. The abbess of the convent of San Paolo had her private dining room painted by Correggio in 1519: a trellis of vine leaves with oval openings, putti climbing through them holding hunting trophies, and Diana over the fireplace. The abbess was a woman of independent means running a convent that had stopped taking the rules seriously, and she commissioned a pagan ceiling for her own use. It was walled up for centuries. Finish with an hour in the ducal park across the river, laid out in the sixteenth century and turned into a French garden in the eighteenth.

An hour east and the plain gives way to a red brick city under the first hills of the Apennines. Bologna's centre is arcaded almost completely, nearly forty kilometres of portico that the city required landlords to build from the thirteenth century onwards so that houses could be extended over the street. It went on the UNESCO list in 2021.

Piazza Maggiore is where the city assembles. San Petronio, on its southern side, was begun in 1390 with the intention of being larger than St Peter's in Rome; the pope is generally thought to have blocked it, the money ran out, and the facade is still bare brick above the marble lower half. Inside, cut into the floor, is a brass meridian line laid by the astronomer Cassini in 1655, sixty seven metres long, with a hole in the roof that puts a spot of sunlight on it at noon. It was used to fix the date of Easter and it is still accurate.

Walk east along Via Rizzoli and the two towers appear at the end of it. Both were built by rival families in the early twelfth century, when the city had dozens; the taller is ninety seven metres and the shorter leans more than three. Neither can be climbed at present: the leaning one was fenced off in 2023 when engineers decided it was moving, and its neighbour closed with it. Looking up at them from the street is still the thing everybody does.

The university had no single building for five hundred years: students hired rooms and lecturers taught where they could. In 1563 the city finally built the Archiginnasio to house it, and its walls and ceilings are covered with the painted coats of arms of six thousand students who passed through, which is the strangest wallpaper in Europe. Upstairs is the anatomical theatre of 1637, a small hall panelled entirely in spruce, with tiered benches around a marble dissection table and two skinned figures carved in wood holding up the canopy where the professor sat. It was flattened in an air raid in 1944 and rebuilt from its own splinters.

Two minutes away, in a plain church off the market lanes, is a group of six life-size terracotta figures made around 1463 by Niccolo dell'Arca: the mourners at the tomb of Christ, three of them running, their clothes blown back, mouths open. Nothing in fifteenth century sculpture is as loud. It is in a side chapel, it costs a couple of euros, and most people walk past the door.

In the afternoon, the Pinacoteca in the university quarter: a Giotto polyptych, Raphael's Saint Cecilia, and rooms of the Carracci and Guido Reni, who made Bologna the most influential school of painting in Italy for a century. The quarter around it is where the students are, so it is also where the cheap wine is.

The sanctuary of San Luca stands on a wooded hill three kilometres south west of the walls, and between 1674 and 1793 the city built a covered walkway all the way to it: six hundred and sixty six arches, close to four kilometres, climbing steadily for the last half. It was paid for arch by arch by guilds, families and parishes, whose names are still on them, and it exists so that a painting of the Virgin could be carried down into the city once a year without getting wet. It still is, every May.

Walk it. Start at the Meloncello arch, allow an hour to the top, take water, and expect the last section to be genuinely steep. The church itself is mid eighteenth century, oval, and the reason to be there is the terrace: the whole plain to the north, the Apennines to the south, and the porticoed line you have just walked laid out below like a seam.

Come down by bus if your legs have gone, and spend the afternoon doing nothing in particular. This is the day to sit in a bar, buy pasta to take home from a shop that makes it in the window, and go back for one more plate of something.

The oldest public park in the city sits just inside the line of the old walls, five minutes from the platforms, on the rubble of a papal fortress that the Bolognese pulled down as often as it was rebuilt. There is a monumental staircase down one side, a rectangle of plane trees, and a market twice a week.

It is the right last half hour: fifteen minutes from a hotel in the centre, five minutes from the platforms, and the arcades run most of the way there so there is no reason to hurry even if it rains.