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Were it not for the cathedral, few travelers would stop at AMIENS. Badly scarred during both world wars, and with heavy traffic pounding along the ring road built over its old city walls, it's not an immediately likeable place. Yet there is more to the town than first meets the eye. St-Leu, the medieval quarter north of the cathedral with its network of canals, has been renovated; the town's university makes its presence felt; and within a few minutes' walk from the train station the hortillonnages transport you into a peaceful rural landscape.
The City
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame (daily: April-Oct 8.30am-7pm; rest of year 8.30am-noon & 2-5pm; closed during services) provides the city's very obvious focus. First of all, it dominates all else by its sheer size - it's the biggest Gothic building in France - but its appeal lies mainly in its unusual uniformity of style. Begun in 1220 under the architect Robert de Luzarches, only the tops of the towers were unfinished in 1269, and so the building escaped the influence of succeeding architectural fads that marred the "purity" of some of its slower sisters.
A miraculous laser scrub, used on the west front, has revealed traces of the original polychrome exterior, adding excitement to the question as to whether these colors should adorn the sculptures again. An evening multicolor light show (daily June-Sept & Dec 15-Jan 6; free) gives a vivid idea of how the west front would have looked when colored. By way of contrast, the interior is all vertical lines and no fuss: a light, calm and unaffected space. Ruskin thought the apse "not only the best, but the very first thing done perfectly in its manner by northern Christendom". The later embellishments, like the sixteenth-century choir stalls, are works of breathtaking virtuosity. The same goes for the sculpted panels depicting the life of St Firmin, Amiens' first bishop, on the right side of the choir screen. The figures in the crowd scenes are shown in fifteenth-century costume, the men talking serious business, while their wives listen more credulously to the preacher's words. One of the most atmospheric ways of seeing the cathedral is to attend a Sunday morning mass (10.15am), when you will be uplifted by sublime Gregorian chanting.
Just north of the cathedral is the quartier St-Leu, a very Flemish-looking network of canals and cottages that was once the centre of Amiens' thriving textile industry. The town still produces much of the country's velvet, but the factories moved out to the suburbs long ago, leaving St-Leu to rot away in peace - until, that is, the local property developers moved in. The slums have been tastefully transformed into neat brick cottages on cobbled streets, and the waterfront has been colonized by restaurants and clubs.
On the edge of town, the canals still provide a useful function as waterways for the hortillonnages - a series of incredibly fertile market gardens, reclaimed from the marshes created by the very slow-flowing Somme. Farmers travel about them in black, high-prowed punts and a few still take their produce into the city by boat for the Saturday morning market, the marché sur l'eau , on the river bank of place Parmentier. If you want to look around the hortillonnages , turn right as you come out of the station and continue straight ahead for about five minutes until you reach the river and the chemin de halage , or towpath, which you can wander down. A map here shows pedestrian routes and viewpoints. If you walk further up boulevard de Beauvillé to no. 54, you will find the Association des Hortillonnages and the embarkation point for their inexpensive, thirty-minute boat trips (April-Oct daily 2-6pm; regular departures, normally depending on a minimum of 12 people; 30F/?4.57), which make for a relaxing glimpse of the market gardens and their way of life.
If you're interested in Picardy culture, you might take a look at Amiens' two regional museums. Five minutes' walk south of central place Gambetta, a nineteenth-century mansion houses the Musée de Picardie (Tues-Sun 10am-12.30pm & 2-6pm; 20F/?3.05), whose star exhibits are the Puvis de Chavannes paintings on the main stairwell and a collection of rare sixteenth-century paintings on wood donated to the cathedral by a local literary society, some of the pictures still in their original frames carved by the same craftsmen who worked the choir stalls. Close by the cathedral, in the seventeenth-century Hôtel de Berny (May-Sept Thurs-Sun 2-6pm; Oct-April Sun 10am-12.30pm & 2-6pm; 10F/?1.52), is an annexe to the main museum, with objets d'art and local-history collections, including a portrait of Choderlos de Laclos, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses , who was born in Amiens. A third museum or documentation centre, at 2 rue Dubois, was the house of Jules Verne , who spent most of his life in Amiens and died here (Mon-Fri 9am-noon & 2-6pm, Sat 2-6pm; 15F/?2.29).
Just to the west of the city, at Tirancourt off the N1 to Abbeville, a large museum/park, Samara , recreates the life of prehistoric man in northern Europe with reconstructions of dwellings and displays illustrating the way of life, trades and so on (mid-March to mid-Nov daily 9.30am-6pm; www.samara.fr ; 59F/?8.99).
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