Autun
"The Romans called it the sister and rival of Rome. Almost nobody visits it now, which is exactly why we did."
A former Roman capital in southern Burgundy with a Roman theatre bigger than the one in Arles and a cathedral carved with one of the strangest, most vivid Last Judgments I've ever stood under.
Autun likes to remind visitors, on plaques and in the tourist office pamphlet, that Emperor Augustus’s own propaganda once called it “sister and rival of Rome,” and that boast is not entirely empty — Autun, then Augustodunum, was a major Roman administrative and educational centre, and it still holds more visible Roman infrastructure than almost anywhere else in Burgundy. Almost nobody outside France seems to know it exists, which after two days there felt more like a gift than an oversight.
Rome, still standing
The Théâtre Romain d’Autun, built in the first century AD, could once seat around twenty thousand people, making it larger than the famous amphitheatre in Arles, though what survives now is mostly the shape of the tiered seating cut into the hillside rather than intact stone walls. We walked its curve in the early morning with nobody else around, then crossed town to the Porte Saint-André, a genuinely well-preserved Roman gate with its arched openings still standing after nearly two thousand years, cars now driving straight through the same passage Roman traffic once used. It’s a strange thing, driving through a gate that old on the way to lunch.
A cathedral’s very literal warning
The Cathédrale Saint-Lazare holds what I think is one of the most striking pieces of medieval sculpture I’ve seen anywhere in France: a tympanum by the sculptor Gislebertus, carved around 1130, depicting the Last Judgment in almost cartoonish, unsettling detail — elongated souls being weighed, demons with clawed hands dragging the damned by their hair, an inscription warning sinners that this fate awaits them. It was plastered over during the eighteenth century, considered too crude for contemporary taste, and only rediscovered and restored in the nineteenth, which somehow makes it feel more startling now, as though it had been kept hidden on purpose. We stood beneath it far longer than we’d planned, working out each grim vignette one by one.
When to go: Spring or autumn for mild walking weather across the town’s spread-out Roman sites, most of which sit outdoors with little shade.
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