Chambéry: The Four Elephants, the Chapel of the Shroud and Rousseau's Charmettes

Required Activities

• Walk round the Fontaine des Éléphants and settle what Timoléon Chapperon meant in 1837 when he called it a monster with no body, made only of four elephant chests and four heads welded together somehow — the local story that the sculptor simply could not carve an elephant's backside is told as legend, not fact

• Stand below the tour Yolande at the castle and listen to the 70-bell carillon, cast by the Paccard foundry at Sévrier, then find the flamboyant Sainte-Chapelle a papal bull of 1466 already called the Sainte-Chapelle du Saint Suaire, and the baroque front put on it between 1655 and 1663

• Under the cathedral's 6,000 square metres of trompe-l'œil, find where Casimir Vicario painted open sky showing through flamboyant Gothic tracery on the vaults in 1834-1835 — there is no tracery and no sky — then look for the 12th-century Byzantine ivory diptych in the treasury

• At Les Charmettes, find Rousseau's room with its alcove bed and Madame de Warens's next door looking down towards Chambéry, then work through the four squares of the garden — medicinal, culinary, vegetable and fruit, some eighty species between them — and the hundred square metres of old Savoyard vines above the house

• Buy a gâteau de Savoie in the old town and eat it in sight of the castle, where in 1416 Amédée VIII is said to have served the Emperor Sigismund a cake shaped like his own territories to mark Savoy becoming a duchy