Ten days in France: Beyond the Capital on the Rhône Line

Land, drop the bags, and walk out to the islands in the Seine. They are where the city began, everything on them is free and outdoors, and they are the right introduction whatever time your flight got in.

Notre-Dame reopened in December 2024 after the fire of 2019 and entry costs nothing, though the queue across the square can be long in the afternoon. If it is, walk around to the east end where the flying buttresses are: the back of this building is the better half and there is never anybody there.

Then over the short bridge to the second island, which is one seventeenth century street with the river on both sides and almost nothing to see, and eat on the south bank.

Sainte-Chapelle at opening, because it is one room and it fills. Louis IX built it in the 1240s to hold what he believed was the Crown of Thorns, and the upper chapel is essentially fifteen tall windows with the minimum of wall left between them. It needs sun; on a grey day the effect simply is not there.

Then the Louvre on a timed afternoon ticket, with one rule: do not attempt it. The collection was assembled for completeness rather than quality, two days would not cover it, and the visit that works is two wings looked at properly.

Come out into the gardens at the end of the afternoon and sit down. They run west from the palace to the big square at the end, they cost nothing, and the chairs by the ponds get moved around to follow the sun.

The Orsay is the museum most people end up preferring, and it is a fraction of the size of yesterday's. It fills a Beaux-Arts railway station finished in 1900 for the world's fair and saved from demolition seventy years later; the great clock still faces the old platform hall. Impressionists on the top floor. Start there and work down.

Rodin in the afternoon is twenty minutes west and is the better choice than a second big museum: an eighteenth century house with a walled garden where most of the important bronzes stand outside among the roses.

Leave the tower for the evening. It is twenty five minutes on from the garden past the Invalides, or one stop on the métro, and after dark it sparkles for five minutes on the hour.

Montmartre is a hill and a village that the city grew around, and it is at its worst between eleven and four. Go at nine. The funicular from the square at the bottom costs a métro ticket and saves the staircase, the basilica opens early, and the steep lanes behind it are empty.

The white church on top was begun in 1875 as an act of penance after the Commune, on the hill where the uprising had started, and took nearly forty years to finish. Behind it there is a working vineyard, a surviving windmill and a small museum in the house where Renoir had a studio.

In the afternoon cross the city to the Marais, which escaped the nineteenth century rebuilding that flattened the medieval streets everywhere else. It is now seventeenth century mansions, falafel queues, galleries and the oldest planned square in Paris, and it is the best part of the city for an aimless couple of hours.

A late morning train out of the Gare de Lyon puts you in Lyon for lunch. Two hours, mostly at three hundred kilometres an hour, and the last half of it through the Burgundy vineyards.

Part-Dieu is a business district; take the métro three stops west and you are on the peninsula, which is where to stay. The afternoon is for walking its length, from the enormous open square at the southern end to the enclosed one at the northern end, which takes twenty minutes if you do not stop and two hours if you do.

Then dinner, which in this city is not a formality. A bouchon is a specific thing: small, loud, pork-heavy, with the wine billed by what you drink of it. Book before you leave Paris.

One day, two layers, and they are stacked on top of each other. Start at the bottom, in the Renaissance quarter along the Saône, where the cathedral took three centuries to build and shows every one of them.

The thing to look for here is not on the streets. The traboules are covered passages that cut straight through the blocks, from one street to the next, through courtyards with spiral staircases in them; silk was carried through them under cover, and around forty are open to the public. Look for the small plaques beside the doors and push gently.

Then take the funicular up the hill. The terrace beside the basilica gives you the whole city, both rivers and, on a clear day, Mont Blanc on the eastern horizon. The basilica behind it was begun in 1872 and its interior is mosaic and gilt to the point of excess.

Five minutes down the slope are the Roman theatres, which are free and are the most substantial thing left of Lugdunum, founded here in 43 BC and run as the capital of Gaul. Walk down through the gardens afterwards; it takes twenty minutes and lands you back in the old town for dinner.

The longest leg of the trip and the best looking one. Four and a half hours or so from Part-Dieu, down the Rhône past Valence and Avignon, then east along the water from Marseille, where the line runs close enough to the sea to see into the boats. Sit on the right for the second half.

You will get in during the afternoon. Drop the bags and go straight up the hill at the eastern end of the seafront, because it closes at sunset and it is the view that explains the shape of the city.

There has been no castle up there since Louis XIV had the fortress demolished in 1706. What is there now is a park with pines, an artificial waterfall and a platform ninety metres above the bay, with a free lift up from the seafront at the bottom. Then walk down into the old town and eat in the street before dinner.

Cimiez is where Nice actually started, on the hill fifteen minutes north of the centre by bus: a Roman town, forgotten for a millennium, rediscovered in the nineteenth century as the address where Queen Victoria wintered. It now holds the two museums that make this city worth a detour rather than a beach.

Chagall first, because it is lower down and smaller. The building was put up around a single cycle of paintings on Old Testament subjects that the artist gave to the state, and he had a hand in designing it; there is stained glass by him in the concert hall.

Then twenty minutes further up to Matisse, in a red seventeenth century mansion among olive trees. He lived in Nice for the last thirty odd years of his life and is buried in the cemetery beside it, and the collection runs from the early dark canvases to the paper cut-outs at the end.

The Roman ruins lie in the same park, directly below the villa, and cost nothing to walk around.

Take the train rather than the bus. Twenty five minutes east from Nice-Ville, mostly in tunnel, and the station inside the rock has an escalator down to the port. The whole country is two square kilometres and you will walk all of it.

Start on the promontory. It is a medieval hill town on a cliff, entirely pedestrian, with the prince's palace at one end and the aquarium at the other, and the guard changes outside the palace at five to twelve in front of a crowd worth beating.

The aquarium is the reason to come even if you think it is not. It was built into the cliff face in 1910, Jacques Cousteau ran it for thirty years, and the Mediterranean tanks below the museum floor are still among the best anywhere.

Late in the day, walk around the harbour to Monte Carlo. The casino was designed by Charles Garnier, who also built the opera in Paris, and you can see the gaming rooms cheaply as a sightseer in the morning or expensively as a gambler after dark, with a passport and a jacket.

A last morning at sea level. The Cours Saleya market runs along the seaward edge of the old town: flowers and produce every morning except Monday, when it becomes a large and genuinely good antiques market instead. It packs up around lunchtime, so go early.

Then a swim, if the season allows, and a plate of something with olives in it. The tram to the airport runs down the middle of town and takes about twenty minutes, and the runway is on the seafront, so the last thing you see of France is the coast you have just spent three days on.