Three days in Reims: France crowned its kings here, and keeps its champagne underneath

The cathedral is best met from the west, straight on. The front is a wall of sculpture, more than two thousand figures deep, and the one everybody looks for is on the left hand doorway: an angel with a tilted head and an unmistakable smile, whose head was knocked off by German shelling in 1914 and put back afterwards. The whole building burned that year and the roof ran with molten lead. What you see is a century of repair, much of it paid for from America.

Inside it is tall and startlingly plain after the front, with thirteenth century glass in the upper windows and, in the chapel directly behind the altar, three windows Marc Chagall designed in the 1970s in a blue that does not belong to any other part of the building. The interior of the west wall is carved as densely as the outside, which is rare and easy to miss because it is behind you as you walk in.

Next door, the Palace of Tau was the archbishop's house and the place kings dressed for their coronation and dined afterwards. It keeps the original statues brought in off the front, so you can stand level with figures designed to be seen from eighty feet below, along with the coronation regalia and a thirteenth century chapel. Finish at the Carnegie library five minutes away, an Art Deco reading room paid for by the Carnegie foundation in the reconstruction, with a stained glass dome and mosaics, and free to walk into.

Walk or take the tram twenty five minutes south to the Basilica of Saint-Remi, which is older, larger and far emptier than the cathedral. It was built from the eleventh century over the tomb of the bishop who baptised Clovis, and the nave is Romanesque for most of its length before turning Gothic at the far end, so the building changes centuries as you walk down it. The tomb itself sits behind the altar, and the shellfire of 1918 means much of what surrounds it is careful modern repair.

The champagne quarter starts across the road. Both of the houses below run tours through chalk pits the Romans cut for building stone, thirty metres down, cool and damp all year and stacked with bottles turning slowly on their racks. Taittinger goes down into the cellars of a vanished abbey; Pommery is the theatrical one, a Victorian estate in a mock Elizabethan style with a staircase of over a hundred steps, carvings cut into the chalk walls and a contemporary art show installed among the bottles.

Do one in the late morning and one in the afternoon if you have any stamina, with lunch in between, and do not drive afterwards. The tasting at the end is small and generous in turns depending on the house, and both sell bottles you will not find at home.

The last morning is Reims before the cathedral. The Porte de Mars, five minutes from the station, is a late Roman triumphal arch of three bays, worn almost smooth, standing on its own in a strip of garden with traffic going round it. It was built when this was Durocortorum, capital of Roman Gaul's northern province and a bigger city then than it was for most of the centuries afterwards.

Walk back through the streets between there and the station and the reconstruction is everywhere once you have your eye in: rounded corners, geometric ironwork, mosaic doorways, and shop fronts that have not been changed since the 1930s.

Then the Hôtel de la Salle, a sixteenth century mansion of the kind that filled this city before 1914 and now barely survives at all, with a carved courtyard front. Look at it from the street, buy a packet of the pink biscuits that Reims makes for dipping in champagne, and walk to the train.