4 Best Sights in Amiens, Champagne Country

By far the largest church in France, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame d'Amiens could enclose Paris's Notre-Dame twice. It may lack the stained glass of Chartres or the sculpture of Reims, but for architectural harmony, engineering proficiency, and sheer size, it's incomparable. The soaring, asymmetrical facade has a notable Flamboyant Gothic rose window and is brought to life on summer evenings when a sophisticated 45-minute light show re-creates its original color scheme. Inside, there's no stylistic disunity to mar the perspective, creating an overwhelming sensation of pure space. Construction took place between 1220 and 1264, a remarkably short period in cathedral-building terms. One of the highlights of a visit here is hidden from the eye, at least until you lift up some of the 110 choir-stall seats and admire the humorous, skillful misericord seat carvings executed between 1508 and 1518 (access with guide only). Audio guides can be rented from the tourist office.

Situated on the east side of town, the Hortillonnages are commercial water gardens—covering more than 700 acres—where vegetables have been cultivated since Roman times. Every Saturday the products grown here are sold at the water market in the St-Leu district. There's a 45-minute boat tour of these aquatic jewels.

Jules Verne (1828–1905) spent his last 35 years in Amiens, and his former home contains some 15,000 documents about his life as well as original furniture and a reconstruction of the writing studio where he created his science-fiction classics. If you're a true Jules Verne fan, you might also want to visit his final resting place in the Cimetière de la Madeleine ( 2 rue de la Poudrière), where he is melodramatically portrayed pushing up his tombstone as if enacting his own sci-fi resurrection.

Behind an opulent columned facade, the Musée de Picardie, built 1855–67, looks like a pompous offering from the Second Empire. Initial impressions are hardly challenged by the grand staircase lined with marouflaged murals by local-born Puvis de Chavannes, or the Grand Salon hung with huge canvases like Gérôme's 1855 Siècle d'Auguste and Maignan's 1892 La Mort de Carpeaux. One step beyond, though, and you're in a rotunda painted top to bottom in modern minimalist fashion by Sol LeWitt. The basement, notable for its masterly brick vaulting, is filled with subtly lighted archaeological finds and Egyptian artifacts. The ground floor houses 18th- and 19th-century paintings by artists such as Fragonard and Boucher.