Autun, 2013

After a pleasant night at Bourges' aire, we turned back toward Burgundy and the old town of Autun, which we've been visiting since 1979. It has some Celtic bits, some Roman bits, some great Romanesque cathedral bits, and a modern town that is attractive and welcoming. I blogged about Autun's cathedral in 2011, so if you want to see more of it, go to http://roadeveron.blogspot.it/2011/07/autun.html.

Autun has a nice aire too, on the lake, maybe a kilometer from the centro; but it
is a bit noisy and angular, so we moved eventually around the lake to the aire by
the Roman theater 

Autun's famous Ecole Militaire, with beautiful Burgundian tiled roofing

Boys old and young and mostly old playing boulles at the park; I think I could
get into this...

The main reason for coming back to Autun is its wonderful Romanesque Cathedral
of St. Lazare and its 12th century sculpture, in its tympanum but mainly in its capitals,
all by Gislebertus..."Gislebertus hoc fecit," "Gislebertus made this," one of the great
signatures of all art

OK, I have to show you just one or two, here, my favorite, Simon the Magician
falling to his death, with St. Peter and Satan looking on, with pleasure

And just one more, never before seen on this blog, a bad guy, a snake, a woman, a
tree...

Anyhow, after the usual couple hours in the cathedral, admiring the barrel vaulting,
wondering about all the cracks, we walked back down through the pretty town of
Autun; here a 19th century shopping arcade

A pedestrian street scene

An Art Nouveau butcher shop, something that never escapes Vicki's keen eyes

Old city wall and tower, partly Medieval, partly Roman, perhaps; Autun comes
from Augustodunum

Augustodunum's theater, said to have seated 20,000

Up closer; the highest tier, built on barrel vaults, is now one; we believe the
theater here may have been what attracted us to Autun in the first place, in
1979...it was the first Roman thing we ever saw in Europe; well, that and the
fact it was on the way to Beaune