Giverny: Monet's Water Lilies and the Japanese Bridge

Required Activities

• Go through Monet's house and find, in the chrome-yellow dining room, the blue-toned Japanese prints he hung there out of a collection of nearly 250 ukiyo-e — one of them a Great Wave off Kanagawa — then the kitchen next door, tiled in Rouen blue and white

• Cross the green Japanese bridge Monet built in 1895 over the pond he had dug from a diverted arm of the Epte, and find the wisteria on it — kept from Monet's own planting when the rotted bridge was rebuilt to the same design

• See the current exhibition at the Musée des impressionnismes, which took over in 2009 from the museum of American art the Terra Foundation ran here from 1992, and walk Mark Rudkin's garden of hedged colour rooms outside it

• Cycle from Vernon to Giverny, about 5 km along the greenway, and finish on the chemin du Roy — the lane that ran between Monet's flower garden and the land he bought on the far side for the water garden

• Walk up the village to the cemetery beside the church of Sainte-Radegonde to find Monet's grave, and stop at the old Hôtel Baudy and its rose garden, where the American painters who followed him to Giverny put up