Cluny

The abbey of Cluny was, for nearly five centuries, the most powerful monastery in Europe. At its peak in the twelfth century, it controlled over a thousand daughter monasteries scattered across the continent, housed hundreds of monks, and maintained a basilica so large that St. Peter’s in Rome would not surpass its length until the sixteenth century. Then the Wars of Religion damaged it, the Revolution suppressed it, and in 1798 the townspeople began dismantling the stone for building material. What remains now is approximately one-tenth of what once stood: two towers of the south transept, a fragment of the nave, the flour barn, the abbots’ palace. The rest is visible only as outlines on the ground, suggested by the street plan of the town that grew up inside the abbey’s footprint.

I arrived on a quiet Tuesday in early October and had the ruins largely to myself. A guide was leading a school group through the surviving south transept — you could see the children looking up at the ceiling, which is still vaulted and elegant — and their voices carried across the open space where the nave used to be. I walked the ground markers that indicate where the walls were. The scale described by those markers is extraordinary and slightly mournful. You are standing in an enormous absence.

The Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie holds a collection of carved capitals salvaged from the abbey’s choir — eight of them survive, each depicting an allegory or a biblical scene, and they are among the finest examples of Romanesque sculpture in France. They are displayed in the flour barn, on elevated platforms that allow you to examine them at something close to their original height. The quality of the carving is remarkable: figures in motion, drapery that actually falls, expressions that read across a millennium. These capitals were high up in the choir, where no one could see them clearly. The monks carved them that way anyway.

The town of Cluny itself is unhurried and very much its own thing. It has a good Tuesday market, several restaurants serving the Charolais beef that the farms around here produce — the white cattle that graze the meadows of southern Burgundy, looking like something from a pastoral painting. I ate at a small table d’hôte run by a woman who served whatever she had decided to cook that morning: a terrine, a lamb daube with lentils, a tarte tatin that was slightly too sweet and entirely correct. The wine was a Mâconnais white from the cooperative down the road, and it cost very little and was very pleasant. Cluny operates at this tempo: serious history, modest present, good lunch.

The surrounding countryside of the Mâconnais is beautiful in a way that doesn’t announce itself. Rolling hills, stone farmhouses with orange-tile roofs, vineyards producing the Mâcon wines that are among Burgundy’s most undervalued whites, villages with Romanesque churches that echo the vanished grandeur of the abbey in miniature. I drove the Route Romane through half a dozen of these villages one afternoon, stopping at each church. All of them were unlocked. All of them smelled of damp stone and old candle wax.

When to go: Cluny works in any dry season — the ruins require good weather to feel properly vast. Spring and autumn are ideal: the chestnut trees along the old abbey walls turn golden, and the tourist volumes are manageable. The Medieval Arts festival in August is popular and well-organized if you want some context beyond your own imagination.