Le Puy-en-Velay: The Pilgrims' Cathedral and the Chapel on the Needle

Required Activities

• Climb the 134 steps of the cathedral stair and keep going under the porch, until the last seventeen steps bring you up into the middle of the nave - a priest once said you enter this church by the navel and leave by the ears; then find the Black Madonna on the high altar, crowned in 1856 to replace the ancient one burnt on the place du Martouret in the Revolution, and the polychrome volcanic stone of the west front

• Climb the 268 steps up the 82m volcanic neck to Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe, the pre-Romanesque oratory finished and consecrated in 961, enlarged at the end of the 12th century when the pilgrims got too many for it, and find the polychrome mosaic facade at the top of the stair

• Climb inside Notre-Dame de France: 33 stone steps up through the pedestal, then a cast-iron spiral of 58 more past three floors where four small openings at each level frame the town, and finally a 16-rung ladder into the crown, where you now look out through a translucent dome

• In the north transept find the 11th-century frescoes - the Holy Women at the Tomb over the Sacred Heart altar, and the giant Saint Michael in the tribune - then go up to the relics chapel in the machicolation building for the Liberal Arts fresco Prosper Merimee uncovered in 1850, where only four of the seven arts survive: Grammar with Priscian, Logic with Aristotle, Rhetoric with Cicero