Périgueux

Périgueux is where you realize the Dordogne has been important for an embarrassingly long time. I walked to the Saturday market through the Cité quarter — the Roman part of town, where the second century AD left an amphitheater, a temple precinct, and the Tour de Vésone, a circular Roman tower that was once a shrine to the local goddess and is now a free-standing ruin in a public garden, surrounded by children on bicycles and pensioners on benches. The morning light was already warm by nine. A cat slept in the amphitheater grass. The layer of Roman life sits under the medieval city sits under the modern city, and Périgueux wears it all with the pragmatism of a place that has been continuously inhabited for two thousand years.

The Cathedral of Saint-Front, visible from anywhere in the city, is one of those buildings that looks different every time you see it — a Byzantine-Romanesque construction of multiple domes and bell towers that the nineteenth century restored with perhaps excessive enthusiasm. From a distance it looks almost Ottoman. From the square in front it looks like four different churches attached at the hip. Inside, the stone vault is cool and dim and the proportions are genuinely surprising — larger than you expect, quieter than the exterior prepares you for.

The Wednesday and Saturday markets in the Place de la Clautre, beside the cathedral, are the commercial heart of the town. The truffle market in January and February draws buyers from Paris and Lyon who arrive with cash and negotiate in hushed voices over baskets of black Périgord truffles that sell for prices that make other luxury food items look modest. In autumn the market runs on walnuts, chestnuts, cèpes, and the first truffles of the season. In summer it runs on vegetables and fruit from the river valley farms, and the pace relaxes into something closer to ordinary weekly commerce.

Dinner in Périgueux should be in the old medieval quarter around the cathedral — not the tourist-facing main street but the network of lanes behind it. The cuisine is the same duck-forward repertoire you find throughout the Dordogne, but Périgueux has chefs with more technical ambition than the village restaurants, and the truffle dishes in winter are done with a confidence that comes from proximity to the source. A simple black truffle omelette, properly made, is one of the few things that lives up to its reputation.

When to go: January and February for the truffle market — a genuine, atmospheric event that draws serious food people. October through December for the produce market at its most varied. Périgueux works year-round as a base for the wider Dordogne; it feels like an actual city after days in the countryside, which has its own appeal.