Saint-Paul-de-Vence

After Charles V's armies twice took or besieged the town, François I decided in 1538 to give Saint-Paul walls able to stand up to artillery. The bastioned enceinte, raised between 1543 and 1547 by the Provençal engineer Jean de Renaud, known as Saint-Rémy, is one of the first of its kind in France and survives whole; Vauban came to inspect it in 1693 and 1700.

Inside, the Rue Grande runs under the fifteenth-century Pontis arch past the townhouses of the seventeenth century to the collegiate church. The painters came in the twentieth century: the inn of La Colombe d'Or, opened in 1931, holds works by Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Braque and Léger; Marc Chagall lived here for nineteen years and is buried in the cemetery; and just outside the walls the Fondation Maeght, opened in 1964, was France's first independent foundation for modern art.