Avignon

Avignon is small — you can walk across the walled city in twenty minutes — and it is the door to everything else in Provence. The popes lived here for most of the fourteenth century and left a palace the size of a district. Everything since has arranged itself around that.

Two nights is what the route gives you. That is enough for the city and one thing outside it, which is the right trade: Avignon rewards a slow afternoon more than a checklist.

You have already chosen how you are staying. This is what the place gives you at each level. Read the one you booked, then read the others, because none of it is fenced off.

Explorer — the walls, the rock and the island

Avignon's best hours cost nothing.

The ramparts are still standing and still ring the whole old town — nearly five kilometres of them, with the gates still doing their job. Walk a stretch rather than all of it.

Climb to the Rocher des Doms, the garden on the rock above the river. It is free, it has a pond with ducks and a view over the Rhône to the fort at Villeneuve, and it is the best half hour in the city for no money at all.

Below it is the Pont Saint-Bénézet — the bridge from the song, which stops in the middle of the river because most of it washed away in the seventeenth century and nobody rebuilt it. You can see the whole thing for free from the rock, or from the bridge at Île de la Barthelasse, which is the photograph everybody actually wants.

Île de la Barthelasse is the river island, one of the largest in France, five minutes on the free ferry in season. Flat, green, full of cyclists, and where locals go when the city is hot.

Les Halles, the covered market, has a living green wall on the front and the best cheap lunch in town inside it. Closed Mondays. Go before one o'clock.

Classic — the palace and the museums

The city with the doors open.

The Palais des Papes is the largest Gothic palace in Europe and takes a good two hours. The audio tablet is worth taking; the rooms are mostly bare, and without it you are walking through enormous empty halls wondering what happened in them. What happened in them was the fourteenth century.

Collection Lambert is the surprise — serious contemporary art in two eighteenth-century mansions, and a complete change of register after the palace. Musée Calvet and the Petit Palais hold the older collections, and the Petit Palais's early Italian paintings are better than a town this size has any right to.

Across the river, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon was where the cardinals built when the city got crowded. Fort Saint-André looks back at Avignon, and the view from its walls is the one that explains the geography.

Premium — the vineyards and a long lunch

Provence at the pace it was designed for.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape is twenty minutes away and is a village with a ruined papal castle on top and some of the most famous vineyards in France below it. A cellar visit here is a proper sit-down tasting rather than a counter and a spittoon.

L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue runs one of Europe's great antiques markets on Sundays, along a river full of moss-covered water wheels. Even on a weekday the permanent dealers are open and the town is worth the trip.

For lunch, La Mirande sits in the shadow of the palace in a house that has been there since the popes, and is the meal people remember from Avignon. Book it before you arrive.

Elite — the day somebody else drives

The Luberon, without the map.

A driver turns the villages from a logistics problem into an afternoon. Gordes stacks up a hillside and is the one on every poster; Roussillon is built from the ochre it sits on and is orange all the way through; Les Baux-de-Provence is a ruined fortress on a limestone spur with the Carrières des Lumières in the quarry below, where they project paintings onto the rock walls at thirty feet high.

Further west, the Pont du Gard is a Roman aqueduct three tiers high that has been standing for two thousand years without mortar. It is half an hour from Avignon and worth an afternoon.

Then a table at one of the Michelin rooms in the surrounding villages, which is the sort of thing that is much easier when you are not driving afterwards.

Practical, at any tier

Avignon is flat and walkable and the old town is largely closed to cars. Avignon TGV is out of town with a shuttle to Avignon Centre, which is the station beside the walls.

Most museums close Monday or Tuesday — check before you plan around one. Les Halles is closed Monday. In July the Festival d'Avignon takes over the entire city and everything is booked months out.

The mistral, the wind that comes down the Rhône valley, is real and it is cold even in a warm month. Bring a layer you would not otherwise pack.