Périgueux Cathedral

Stand still for a moment and look up. Above you, pale limestone climbs in layers toward a cluster of round domes. Each one is topped with a small, pointed lantern. On a clear day the stone turns almost cream-coloured in the sun. When clouds pass over, it turns a soft grey. The sound of the city drops away here. You hear pigeons, footsteps on the square, and perhaps a bell. This is Saint-Front, the cathedral of Périgueux.

The building takes its name from Saint Front. Tradition calls him the first bishop of Périgueux and the man who brought Christianity to this region. Legend has it that he travelled here in the earliest centuries of the faith. Legend also says he drove out pagan worship from the old Roman town. The details of his life are folklore rather than firm history. Even so, his name has been tied to this hill for well over a thousand years.

The church you see grew in stages. A smaller religious building stood here first. The great domed church rose in the twelfth century, during the Romanesque period. Romanesque is the style of building that spread across Europe before Gothic. It used round arches, thick walls and heavy, solid forms. But Saint-Front does not look like most Romanesque churches in France. Its shape points much further east, toward Venice and Constantinople.

Here is the first surprise. Seen from above, the church forms a Greek cross. That means a cross with four equal arms. A dome rises over the centre, and one dome rises over each arm. That makes five domes in total. This plan is very rare in western Europe. Historians often compare it with Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice, which follows the same idea. Pilgrims and merchants carried ideas along trade routes, and this building shows how far those ideas could travel.

Why would a church in the Dordogne look toward Venice? One reason is the road. Périgueux sat on one of the great pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostela, in northwest Spain. For centuries, walkers passed through this town on their way south. Today the cathedral is part of a group of sites listed by UNESCO along those routes in France. You may still see modern pilgrims here, with packs on their backs and a scallop shell on their bag.

In the twelfth century, Saint-Front was not yet a cathedral. It was the church of a monastery, and the bishop had his seat elsewhere. That older cathedral stood in the lower part of town, in the old Roman quarter called the Cité. Only in the seventeenth century did the bishop's seat move up here. So the building you see has lived two lives. First it was an abbey church. Then it became the mother church of the diocese.

Now for the second surprise. Much of what you see today is not twelfth-century work. In the nineteenth century the church was in poor condition. The architect Paul Abadie led a very large restoration. He rebuilt big parts of the structure. He also added many of the small lanterns and turrets on the roof. Some critics at the time felt he went too far. They said he made the church look more ideal than it ever was.

Abadie's work here had a famous result far from Périgueux. Later in his career, he designed the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the white church on the hill of Montmartre in Paris. Look at the domes above you and picture that basilica. The family resemblance is clear. In a sense, Saint-Front was the rehearsal. Many visitors climb Montmartre without knowing that its design partly began here, in a small city in southwest France.

Turn your attention to the bell tower. It rises at the western end, and it is one of the older parts of the site. It climbs in stages, each one narrower than the last. Rows of columns ring the upper levels. At the very top sits a cone-shaped roof of stone, a little like a pine cone. This tower survived the heavy restoration better than the domes did. It gives you a stronger sense of the medieval builders' own hand.

Inside, the mood changes. The space is wide, open and quite bare. Huge square piers hold up the domes. They are so thick that you could almost walk through the passages cut into them. The walls are mostly plain stone, without bright paint. Light enters from small windows and falls in soft shafts across the floor. Your voice and your footsteps carry upward and return slowly. It feels more like a cave of stone than a jewel box.

As you walk, notice how your eyes move. You look up into one dome, then the next, then across to the far arm of the cross. There is no single long nave pulling you toward the altar, as in a Gothic church. Instead, the space spreads out in every direction from the centre. Stand directly under the central dome. Turn slowly in a full circle. You will see how the four arms balance each other.

When you step back outside, look at the streets around the cathedral. The old town of Périgueux slopes down toward the river Isle. Narrow lanes run between houses of the same pale stone. Small squares open up without warning. On market days, the area near the cathedral fills with stalls. In winter, this region is known for truffles and duck, and you may smell them in the air. The cathedral and the market have shared this hill for centuries.

Before you leave, take one more look at the skyline. If you can, walk down to the riverbank and turn back. From there, the domes and the bell tower rise above the rooftops together. This is the view that travellers on the pilgrim road would have seen as they arrived. The stone has been cut, repaired and rebuilt many times. But the shape on the hill has stayed... and it still tells you where the heart of the town is.