Brioude and Lavaudieu: The Polychrome Basilica and the Only Romanesque Cloister in Auvergne

Required Activities

• Walk the 74 metres of the nave and sort the stone as you go: red sandstone from Allevier, pale sandstone from Beaumont, black basalt from La Vergueur and marble from Lauriat, all quarried within a few kilometres — then look down at the floor, laid in black and white pebbles out of the Allier in geometric arabesques

• Stand in the choir on the mosaic of polychrome stone rosettes, the one surviving piece of the Carolingian church of the 8th and 9th centuries that stood here before this one, then go down into the crypt beneath the choir lantern where the remains of Saint Julien are kept

• Climb the little spiral stair to the chapel of Saint-Michel in the tribune above the avant-nef and read the 13th-century frescoes in order: Christ in glory with the four evangelists on the vault, then on the cross wall hell along the bottom and, above it, Michael and Gabriel beating Satan

• Hunt four carvings down in the nave: the minotaur holding his own horns, pinned between two lyre players and next to the twin sirens, the monkey tamer, the miser clutching his account book, and the Holy Women at the tomb. Then find the larger-than-life polychrome wooden Christ of the early 15th century, brought here from the leper house of la Bajasse, which legend says took a leper's disease into itself when he lay down on it

• Walk the cloister of Saint-André at Lavaudieu, built in 1057 by Robert de Turlande and the only Romanesque cloister any Auvergne abbey still has, then find the Byzantine-style fresco in its refectory and the ash-wood copy of the abbey's Romanesque Christ — the original is in two museums, its head in the Louvre and its torso in the Metropolitan in New York. Benedictine nuns lived here until the Revolution, when the village had already been renamed from Comps to Lavaudieu, the valley of God, in 1487