Maison Carrée

Stand at the foot of the steps for a moment. The stone under your hand is a pale, honey-coloured limestone, warm in the sun and cool in the shade. Above you, tall fluted columns rise to carved capitals of curling acanthus leaves. Around you, café chairs scrape, and pigeons settle on the cornice. You are looking at one of the best-preserved temples anywhere in the old Roman world, and it still stands in the middle of a living city square.

This is the Maison Carrée, which means the Square House. And here is the first surprise. The building is not square at all. It is clearly a rectangle, longer than it is wide. The name comes from older French, where a rectangle could be called a long square. So the name is an old description. It describes shape in the language of another century, not the geometry we use today.

The temple was built at the very end of the first century before Christ, in the age of the emperor Augustus. At that time this town was a Roman colony called Nemausus. The name came from a local spring and the god people linked to it. Veterans and settlers lived here, on an important road between Italy and Spain. A temple like this one was a clear statement. It showed that this southern town belonged fully to Rome.

Originally the temple did not stand alone. It sat at one end of the forum, the main public square of the Roman town. Colonnades, or covered walkways with columns, surrounded the open space. Merchants, officials and citizens met there every day. Today the colonnades are gone. But the open square around you follows a similar idea. It is still a place where people cross, meet and sit. In this sense, the old function survives.

Look at the shape of the building. It stands on a high platform, called a podium, and you can only enter from the front, up one wide flight of steps. This was typical of Roman temples. Greek temples were often open on all sides. Roman temples faced one direction and spoke to the forum in front of them. A deep porch of free-standing columns leads to the inner room. Along the sides and back, the columns are half-columns, attached to the wall.

The columns follow the Corinthian order. That is the most decorated of the classical styles, recognised by capitals carved like bundles of leaves. Look up at the band of stone above the columns. You will see a frieze carved with flowing plant scrolls. Under the roof edge there are small carved brackets in a steady rhythm. Stonemasons shaped all of this by hand, more than two thousand years ago, and much of the fine carving is still sharp.

Now a detail most visitors miss. Look at the front of the building, just below the triangular pediment. You will see rows of small holes in the stone. Bronze letters were once fixed there, forming a dedication. The letters disappeared long ago. In the eighteenth century, a local scholar from Nîmes, Jean-François Séguier, studied the pattern of the holes. From their positions, he worked out the words of the lost inscription.

His work and later studies link the temple to Gaius and Lucius Caesar. They were the grandsons of Augustus, whom the emperor adopted as his heirs. Both young men died early, and temples honoured them across the empire. Many historians also connect the project with Marcus Agrippa, the general and close friend of Augustus. So this building carries the story of a ruling family and its hopes for the future. Those hopes ended in grief.

Why did this temple survive when so many others fell? The answer is simple. People kept using it. Over the centuries it served many roles. It was used as a meeting hall for town leaders, as a private house, and even as a stable. Later it became a church for a religious community, then a place for archives. In the nineteenth century it became a museum. Each new use gave someone a reason to keep the roof up.

The building also travelled far beyond Nîmes, as an idea. Thomas Jefferson saw it while living in France in the 1780s. He admired it deeply. He used it as the model for the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, in the young United States. In Paris, the church of the Madeleine also follows the same type of Roman temple. So the shape in front of you helped shape public buildings on two continents.

Now turn around and look across the square. There you will see a building of glass, steel and thin columns. This is the Carré d'Art, a museum of contemporary art and a library, designed by the architect Norman Foster and opened in the 1990s. Its slender columns and its portico answer the Roman temple across the paving. The two buildings face each other like a conversation between two thousand years. The modern one reflects the ancient one in its glass.

In recent years the temple received a careful restoration, cleaning the stone and repairing damage. In 2023, UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List. Inside, the old temple room is usually used to show a short film about the history of the city. The room is simple and quite dark. The real experience is often outside, walking slowly around the podium, and seeing how the light changes on each face of the stone.

Before you leave, walk once more around the building. Notice how the evening sun turns the limestone gold, and how the shadows sharpen every leaf on the capitals. Listen to the town around you — voices, footsteps, a scooter in a side street. Romans once stood here and heard their own city. When you walk away, look back once from the edge of the square. The temple is still there, doing what it has always done: holding the centre of Nîmes.