Avignon: the city of the Popes on the Rhône

The Palace of the Popes, a papal residence from 1309 to 1377, remains Europe's largest Gothic building, with original frescoes still visible in some rooms.

A few steps away, the Saint-Bénézet Bridge, made famous by the song 'Sur le pont d'Avignon', breaks halfway across the Rhone river after repeated historical collapses.

Continuing along the medieval walls that still today encircle the entire city, you walk through cobbled alleys of the historic center.

Toward evening, the Place de l'Horloge animates restaurants and cafes in the heart of the old city.

Seven consecutive popes resided in Avignon between 1309 and 1377, a period known as the 'Avignon Papacy,' before the papacy returned definitively to Rome after decades of tensions with France.

The Saint-Bénézet Bridge, originally nearly nine hundred meters long with twenty-two arches, was repeatedly damaged by Rhone floods until being abandoned midway following the last collapse in the seventeenth century, remaining unfinished on the river.