Saumur: City Hall and

(Continuing our field trip...)

After our morning visit to the chateau, we walked down the hill for a guided tour of the city hall. Our guide was excellent, had much information to share, and was able to show us inside to view some of the highly detailed interiors:

He then joined us for a short bus ride along the Loire for a visit to Notre Dame des Ardilliers. If I have the legend correct, a peasant found a statue representing The Pietà around the middle of the 15th century, and multiple times the statue was taken from the site, lost, and then re-found at the same location. So people gave up moving it, and simply built a church around it, despite the ground being full of clay (the spot is near the river). The French word for "clay" is something like "argile," and over the years that transformed into "ardilliers," hence the name of the church.

One thing I found interesting about this church is that it has many unfinished pieces, such as the pediment shown above (the triangular part above the columns). This simply has big blocks of stone ready for a sculptor to do his work, but the church has no records of what the intended scenes were to be, and this in addition to the extreme cost of such work leaves things incomplete.

More pics.

Things continue at Chambord.

Saint Gatien's Cathedral

(Continuing our field trip from the Vinci Conference Center...)

If you haven't noticed, we had perfect weather for this weekend. Cloudless blue skies every day.

To wrap up our afternoon at Tours, we walked over to Saint Gatien's Cathedral, another structure built over several hundred years due to fires, financing, wars, etc. You would have to zoom in on the high-resolution version of the above image, but you can see many slight ornamental and detailing differences between the two towers. The north tower (if I'm remembering correctly) was built first at the very start of the 16th century, followed by the south tower several decades later, and even this change in time was sufficient to warrant new details and an upgraded facade.

One of the most striking aspects of the church is the organ, a massive thing placed just below a beautiful rose window at the south end of the transept.

As usual, more pics here.

And the field trip continues here.