Explorer Avignon

Avignon Cathedral, Notre-Dame-des-Doms, is a Romanesque church built mainly in the second half of the 12th century on the rock beside the Palais des Papes, and the seat of the Archbishop of Avignon. Its bell tower, rebuilt in 1425, has carried a gilded statue of the Virgin since 1859, and inside is the Gothic tomb of Pope John XXII, who died in 1334.

The Calvet Museum is Avignon's fine arts museum, founded on the collections that the physician Esprit Calvet left to the city in 1810. It occupies the Hôtel de Villeneuve-Martignan, a mansion completed in 1749 to designs by Jean-Baptiste Franque, and shows paintings from the 16th to the 20th century, including David's Death of Young Bara, with sculpture and decorative arts.

The Rocher des Doms is a rocky outcrop above the Rhône beside the Palais des Papes, settled since the Neolithic. Its summit holds a 19th-century English-style garden of about 3 hectares with a pond, statues of local figures and a terrace 30 m above the river looking over the Pont Saint-Bénézet and the Rhône valley.

The Musée du Petit Palais occupies the former palace of the archbishops of Avignon, begun around 1318 and remodelled under Giuliano della Rovere in the late 15th century. Opened in 1976, it shows Italian paintings from the 13th to the early 16th century from the Campana collection, including a Madonna and Child by Botticelli, and medieval painting and sculpture from Avignon.