Caen

Caen is the Normandy city that demands the most work from a visitor, and returns the most to those who make it. Bombed into near-total ruin during the seventy-seven day Battle of Caen in the summer of 1944 — one of the most prolonged and destructive urban battles of the entire war — the city rebuilt itself almost entirely from scratch, and what rose from the rubble was not what had been there before. You can see the seam: the medieval churches that survived by luck or by being too heavily built to collapse, standing in their entirety within a grid of 1940s and 1950s streets. The urban texture of Caen is a palimpsest of catastrophe and continuity, and once you understand what you are looking at, you cannot un-see it.

The Abbaye aux Hommes, the monastery William the Conqueror founded in 1063 as a condition of papal forgiveness for his rather irregular marriage to his cousin Matilda, is the city’s oldest statement of ambition. The twin towers of the abbey church of Saint-Étienne rise above the western end of the city with a gravity that was meant to be seen from the sea, and on a clear day you can see them from fifteen kilometres out on the road from Paris. William is buried somewhere beneath the choir — somewhere, because his tomb was desecrated during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century and again during the Revolution, and what remains is uncertain. There is a single femur. The city has chosen not to make much of this indignity.

The Mémorial de Caen, which opened in 1988 in the grounds of a World War II German headquarters, is the most sophisticated museum I have been to on the subject of the Second World War — not because it is the largest or the most dramatically designed, but because of the intellectual seriousness with which it traces how a continent arrived at that war. The early galleries move through the inter-war period, the rise of fascism, the specific failures of diplomacy that allowed what became inevitable to become actual, with a clarity that makes you angry and sad in equal measure. The D-Day sections below ground are powerful in a different way: the personal testimonies, the photographs, the material culture of the assault. I spent three hours and left feeling that I had not finished.

The city also has a Sunday morning market in the central square, Place Saint-Sauveur, that is genuinely one of the better market experiences in Normandy. Produce comes in from the bocage countryside to the south and the coast to the north, and by ten o’clock the stalls hold everything from live oysters to calvados to unpasteurised cream cheese in terracotta pots. The tripe merchants are there, which will either intrigue or repel you depending on your relationship with offal — Norman tripe cooked with calvados and vegetables is the kind of dish that divides opinion strongly and deserves to.

The Abbaye aux Dames, which Matilda herself founded as the symmetrical counterpart to William’s monastery on the other side of the city, is now used partly as offices and partly as a concert venue, and the Romanesque church of La Trinité at its heart is visited by a fraction of the tourists who make it to its twin. The relative quiet makes it easier to stand in the nave and notice the quality of the light and the weight of the silence, which are considerable. Matilda is buried here; her tomb, unlike William’s, is intact.

When to go: Caen rewards visits year-round. The Mémorial is open eleven months of the year (closed in January for maintenance) and is best in winter when the light through its underground galleries does something specific and the crowds are thin. The Sunday market runs every week. Come for a full day rather than a quick stop between D-Day beaches.