The Empty Palace – Reading Absence in the City of the Popes
Best Time: Arrive at the Place du Palais for the 9:00 AM opening (10:00 AM in winter) to have the great halls nearly to yourself. Save the bridge for late afternoon, when the light on the ramparts turns warm. The palace and bridge close at 7:00 PM from March to early November and at 5:00 PM in late autumn.
Bring: A charged smartphone and earbuds for the palace web app, binoculars for vault frescoes and carved bosses, a layer for unheated halls and for the wind on the bridge, and shoes for a great many stairs.
Focus: Learning to read what is missing. Understanding why Europe’s largest Gothic palace stands almost bare, what its surviving painted rooms reveal about the men who lived here, and how a bridge that no longer crosses its river became the most famous in France.
Welcome to Avignon, and to the Place du Palais, where for most of the fourteenth century the center of Western Christendom stood not in Rome but here, on a limestone rock above the Rhône. Seven popes ruled from the building in front of us. Two more, whom Rome never accepted, held out behind its walls into the next century. A river town of perhaps six thousand people grew to twenty-five thousand as cardinals, bankers, lawyers and painters followed the papal court north. And then the court left. What remains is the largest Gothic palace in Europe, and it is very nearly empty. Many visitors find that a disappointment. This walk asks you to treat it as the subject. Avignon is a city of absences: a palace without its popes, a bridge that stops in midstream, a song that misremembers where the dancing happened. Over the next hours we will practice reading what is no longer here.
One practical word before we begin. The palace is reworking its visitor route through the spring of 2027, so the order of rooms may differ from the sequence I describe. If you are reading this after 2027, same thing applies as they may have changed things. Each stop is identified by the name of the room. If you reach them in a different order, simply skip ahead and return.
Section 1: The Place du Palais – Reading the Façade
Stand in the middle of the square, well back from the palace, where you can take in the full width of the façade. Before this was a square it was a crowded medieval quarter. The popes cleared the houses away so that the building could be seen, and so that anyone approaching it could be seen in turn. Notice how little there is to hold on to. No rose window, no sculpted portal, no rows of saints. Walls three meters thick, tall blind arches that are really machicolations for dropping things on attackers, and a few narrow openings. This is a statement about security made by men who had left Italy because Italy was not safe.
Detail Discovery 1: Two Palaces in One Wall Let your eye travel from left to right and look for the seam. The northern half, to our left, is the Old Palace, built from 1335 for Benedict XII, a Cistercian monk who wanted a fortified monastery and got one: plain, heavy, almost windowless. The southern half, to our right, is the New Palace, begun only seven years later for his successor Clement VI, a Limousin aristocrat with a taste for ceremony. The masonry is finer, the arches taller, and the main gate, the Porte des Champeaux, is crowned by two slender octagonal turrets. Those turrets are themselves an absence restored. They were pulled down as unsafe in 1770 and rebuilt in 1933. Two popes, two temperaments, less than twenty years apart, and we can read the difference in stone before you buy a ticket.
Detail Discovery 2: The Dragons Across the Square Now put our backs on the palace and face the ornate building opposite, the Hôtel des Monnaies. Where the palace has no decoration at all, this façade of 1619 has almost nothing else: fat garlands of fruit, eagles, and winged dragons. The eagle and dragon are the arms of the Borghese family, whose pope, Paul V, reigned in Rome when it was built. That is the point worth holding on to. The popes left Avignon in the 1370s, but the city remained papal property, governed by Italian legates, until 1791. The palace is the monument of the century the popes were here. This façade is a reminder of the four centuries in which they owned Avignon from a distance.
Photo Opportunity: From the southwest corner of the square, near the Hôtel des Monnaies, a wide lens takes in the whole façade with the cathedral tower and its gilded Virgin at the left edge. Morning light is flat here; the façade faces west and glows in the last hour before sunset.
Section 2: The Old Palace – Benedict XII’s Fortress Monastery
We enter through the Porte des Champeaux, pass security and ticketing, and connect our phones to the palace Wi-Fi to load the web app, Les Clefs du Palais, which has replaced the tablet guide described in older guidebooks. Then put the phone in your pocket for a moment and walk out into the great courtyard.
Detail Discovery 3: The Cour d’Honneur Stand at the center of the courtyard and turn slowly. We are in the hinge between the two palaces: Benedict’s wings to the north, Clement’s to the south and west. For five centuries this was a parade ground for papal guards, then for French infantry. In September 1947 the actor and director Jean Vilar staged Shakespeare’s Richard the Second here, a play about a king who loses his crown, in a courtyard whose rulers had lost theirs. That production became the Festival d’Avignon. Every July a bank of two thousand seats fills this space. Find the tall traceried window on the upper level of the western wing. That is the Indulgence Window. We will stand behind it later. For now, imagine the courtyard packed with pilgrims looking up at it.
Follow the route into the Old Palace toward the Consistory, the long hall on the ground floor of the east wing.
Detail Discovery 4: The Consistory and the Chapel of Saint John This is where the pope met his cardinals in council, received kings and ambassadors, and examined candidates for sainthood. The walls were frescoed by Matteo Giovannetti. A fire in 1413 destroyed every trace. What hangs here now came from next door: the remains of the frescoes Simone Martini of Siena painted on the cathedral porch around 1340, detached for their protection, together with the red-earth underdrawings found beneath them. Look at those underdrawings closely. They are a master’s first thoughts, never meant to be seen. Now step into the small chapel opening off the hall, the Chapel of Saint John. Here Giovannetti survives: the lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, painted between 1346 and 1348 on a ground of deep blue. Look for neat rectangular gaps where heads ought to be. In the nineteenth century, when the palace was a barracks, soldiers cut out the painted faces and sold them to collectors. The losses are as crisp as if they were made yesterday.
Climb to the upper level by way of the cloister of Benedict XII. Pause in the cloister walk. This quiet square, with its plain arcades, is the clearest surviving expression of what the Cistercian pope wanted: a monastery with a garrison.
Detail Discovery 5: The Grand Tinel Enter the banqueting hall and walk to the middle before you look up. Forty-eight meters long, under a great wooden barrel vault. The vault you see is a twentieth-century reconstruction; the original, burned in that same fire of 1413, was lined with blue cloth scattered with gold stars, so that the pope dined beneath a night sky. On feast days he sat alone on a dais at the south end. Guests sat on benches along the walls, on one side of the table only, facing the center. This hall had a second purpose. When a pope died, the cardinals were locked in here to elect his successor. Openings were knocked through to the neighboring rooms for sleeping space, and every door to the outside was walled up with masonry until a decision was reached. Look along the side walls for the traces of blocked archways. Then look higher, for rows of square sockets cut into the stone. Those held the beams of the extra floors the army built to turn one hall into three levels of dormitory.
Detail Discovery 6: The Kitchen Tower and the Chapel of Saint Martial At the north end of the Tinel, find the door to the upper kitchen. Step in and look straight up. The entire room is a chimney: an eight-sided stone pyramid rising eighteen meters to a vent in the roof. Clement VI built it for a court that could sit several thousand guests at a coronation feast. Return to the Tinel and find the small chapel in its east wall, dedicated to Saint Martial of Limoges. This was Giovannetti’s first commission here, in 1344 and 1345, and the choice of saint was personal: Clement came from the Limousin, and Martial was its apostle. The blue is lapis lazuli, ground from stone carried from Afghanistan and worth more than gold. Even in the emptiest palace in France, this small room tells you what the rest once cost. Photography is not permitted here – so use your mental capacities to remember what we see.
Photo Opportunity: In the Grand Tinel, stand at the south end and shoot the full length of the vault with a figure in the far doorway for scale. In the kitchen, point the lens vertically up the chimney pyramid.
Section 3: The Private Apartments – Where the Paint Survives
From the Tinel the route passes through the robing chamber, where visitors waited to be admitted, and into the Tower of the Angels, the most heavily defended part of the palace. The treasury lay at its base, with strongboxes hidden in vaults beneath the paving stones. The pope slept above it. In this building, privacy and security were the same thing.
Detail Discovery 7: The Pope’s Chamber Enter the bedchamber and let your eyes adjust. Photography is not allowed, which is a gift: you will have to look. Every wall is painted, floor to ceiling, in tempera on a blue ground. Great scrolls of vine and oak wind across the surface, and among the leaves are birds and squirrels. There is not one religious image in the room. Now go to the window recesses and look at their sides. The painters added birdcages, drawn in careful perspective as if hanging in the embrasure. The cages are empty. Whether birds were once painted inside them or the pope kept living songbirds nearby is not certain. Either way, in a palace defined by what has gone, here is an absence the medieval painter put there himself. Look down as well. The glazed tile floor is a modern copy of fourteenth-century tiles found in Benedict XII’s study next door.
Detail Discovery 8: The Chambre du Cerf Pass through into the adjoining tower room, the Stag Room, Clement VI’s private study, painted in 1343. If you remember one room in Avignon, let it be this one. The walls are a continuous forest. Find the stag hunt that gives the room its name, with a hound closing on its quarry. Find the falconer with a bird on his fist. Find the boy who has climbed a tree to pick fruit, and the man sending a ferret down a rabbit hole. Then find the fishpond. Four figures stand around a rectangular stone basin, working nets and lines, and the basin is drawn in recession, its far edge shorter than its near edge. That is an Italian idea, perspective, arriving in France inside a French subject, the pleasures of a nobleman’s estate. Scholars still argue over whether the hands were French or Italian. The likeliest answer is both, working side by side. This is how the international style of the next century was born: in rooms like this, where a pope from the Limousin employed painters from Viterbo and Siena to remind him of the countryside he grew up in. Stand in the center and turn once more. The head of the Church, alone at his desk, chose to be surrounded not by saints but by trees.
Section 4: The New Palace – Clement VI’s Theater of Power
Leave the private apartments and follow the route into the New Palace. Notice the change as you cross from one building to the other. Passages widen, vaults rise, and carved decoration begins to appear on corbels and keystones. Benedict built to be safe. Clement built to be seen.
Detail Discovery 9: The Great Chapel Enter the Great Chapel, also called the Clementine Chapel, and walk to its center. Fifty-two meters long, fifteen wide, twenty high, and not a single column. One uninterrupted nave of seven bays, raised in well under a decade. It was built this size for a reason. Every ceremony of the papal year, with its processions of cardinals, clergy and ambassadors, had to fit inside it. In effect Clement was saying that the papacy had not gone into exile. Rome was wherever the pope was. The walls were never frescoed; they were hung with tapestry and silk on feast days and are bare stone now. Listen to the room instead. Speak a word and count how long it lasts. The papal choir that sang here drew some of the best musicians in Europe, and Avignon became one of the workshops of the new polyphonic music of the fourteenth century.
Detail Discovery 10: The Indulgence Window Leave the chapel by its great west door and step onto the loggia. In front of you is the large traceried window you saw from the courtyard. After his coronation, and on great feast days, the pope stood here and gave his blessing three times to the crowd below. The tracery is a reconstruction of the early twentieth century, pieced together from fragments after the army left. Step up to it and look down into the Cour d’Honneur. This is the sightline that explains the New Palace. The courtyard, the grand staircase beside you, the door of the chapel behind you: all of it is stage design, built so that thousands of people could see one man at a window.
Descend the grand staircase. It is broad, straight and vaulted, an unusual design for its date, made for processions rather than for defense. At the bottom, enter the Great Audience Hall.
Detail Discovery 11: The Great Audience and the Prophets You are directly beneath the Great Chapel, in a hall of the same length divided by a row of columns into two aisles. This was a courtroom. The judges of the papal appeals court sat here on a circular bench, the rota, which gave the tribunal the name it still carries in Rome today. Cases came from every diocese in Europe: disputed marriages, contested wills, quarrels over church appointments. Walk to the eastern end and look up into the vault of the last bay. Against a deep blue sky scattered with stars, some twenty Old Testament prophets and kings sit in rows, each holding a scroll with his own words. Giovannetti painted them in 1352 and 1353, as Clement’s reign ended. They presided over the judges’ bench: a reminder, to the men giving judgment, that they too would be judged. A Last Judgment once covered the wall below. It is gone, lost during the barracks years. As you study the carved corbels along the walls, look for small animals and grotesque faces. The masons were allowed a humor here that the façade never shows.
If the terraces are open, climb to them before you leave. From the roof you can see the whole plan of the building, the river, and the bridge that is our last stop. Your ticket also admits you to the restored papal gardens on the east side, where Urban V kept an orchard and Clement VI is said to have kept a lion.
Photo Opportunity: From the loggia, frame the Cour d’Honneur through the stone tracery of the Indulgence Window. On the terraces, look north for the cathedral’s gilded Virgin against the river.
Section 5: Notre-Dame des Doms and the Rocher
Leave the palace, turn right, and climb the ramp to the cathedral that stands just to its north. After the scale of the palace it looks modest, and it is. This church was here two centuries before the popes arrived.
Detail Discovery 12: The Cathedral of Three Layers Stop in front of the porch before you enter. Its fluted columns and triangular pediment look Roman, and that is deliberate. Provençal builders of the twelfth century lived among ancient ruins and copied what they saw. This porch is where Simone Martini painted the frescoes you met in the Consistory. The lunette above the door is now bare. Look up to the top of the tower. The gilded lead Virgin, weighing some four and a half tons, was hoisted there in 1859. So in one glance you have the Romanesque church of the 1100s, the ghost of a Sienese fresco from the 1340s, and a statue from the age of the railway. Go inside and find the side chapel that holds the tomb of John XXII: a forest of Gothic pinnacles in white stone over a reclining figure. John was the pope who decided to stay. Elected at seventy-two as a compromise expected to die quickly, he reigned for eighteen years, filled the treasury, and made Avignon permanent. The small statues that once stood in the niches of his tomb were smashed in the Revolution. Count the empty niches.
Continue uphill from the cathedral into the gardens of the Rocher des Doms. This rock is where Avignon began; people have lived on it since the Stone Age. The garden is being restored in stages through June 2027, and the panoramic terrace may be closed when you visit. If it is open, walk to the northern edge. If not, the view from the bridge and from the far bank will serve.
From the terrace, find the bridge directly below you, its four arches ending in open water. Follow its line across the river to the square tower on the far bank. That is the tower of Philippe le Bel, built by the King of France to guard his end of the crossing. In the fourteenth century you would have been standing in the pope’s territory, looking at a foreign kingdom. The cardinals built their country houses over there, in the town still called Villeneuve, the new town. On a clear day the pale summit on the northeastern horizon is Mont Ventoux. The poet Petrarch, who grew up in papal Avignon and came to despise its court, climbed that mountain in 1336 for no reason except to see the view, and wrote one of the first accounts of doing so.
Photo Opportunity: From the Rocher terrace, the bridge runs diagonally into the frame with the Philippe le Bel tower beyond. Morning and midday light are kindest; late in the day you will be shooting toward the sun.
Section 6: Pont Saint-Bénézet – The Bridge That Stops
Descend from the Rocher toward the river, or if the garden paths are closed, walk down the Rue de la Balance from the Place du Palais. The entrance to the bridge is inside the ramparts, through a small gatehouse. Walk out onto the roadway as far as the chapel on the second pier.
Detail Discovery 13: The Chapel and the Broken End First, the legend. In 1177 a young shepherd named Bénézet came down from the hills saying that a voice had told him to build a bridge across the Rhône. The bishop mocked him. Bénézet picked up a block of stone that thirty men could not move, carried it to the bank, and laid the first foundation. What is certain is that a bridge was begun in those years, that a brotherhood was founded to maintain it, and that Bénézet was buried on it. The chapel beside you, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron of boatmen, held his body until the seventeenth century. Step down into it. It has two levels, a Romanesque chapel below and a Gothic one added above when the roadway was raised. The first bridge was wrecked in the siege of 1226, when a French royal army took the city. It was rebuilt on twenty-two arches, about nine hundred meters across two channels of the river and the island between them. Then the Rhône went to work. Arch after arch fell to floods and was repaired, until in the 1660s the town stopped trying. Now walk to the very end and stand at the rail. Listen for the song. The words every French child knows say that people danced on the bridge. Look at the width of the roadway behind you. There was never room. The dancing was on the island, in the riverside taverns beneath the arches. Under the bridge, not on it. Even the song is about something that is not quite here.
Departure Meditation: Stay at the end of the bridge, facing the water where the fifth arch should be. Then turn around and look back at the city. From here the whole walk is laid out in one view: the ramparts, the rock, the cathedral with its gold figure, and behind it the great blank wall of the palace. Consider what you have actually seen today. A banqueting hall without a table. A chapel without its hangings. Frescoes with the faces cut out, a porch without its painting, a tomb with empty niches, birdcages without birds, and now a bridge without a far side. It would be easy to call that a list of losses. But notice that each absence sent you looking for something. The bare hall made you find the beam holes. The missing faces made you look harder at the ones that remain. The broken bridge makes you look at the river. A furnished palace tells you what to think. An empty one asks you a question, and Avignon has been asking the same one for six hundred years: what is left of power when the powerful have gone? The answer is around you. A few painted rooms, a wall, a song, and a town that turned the popes’ courtyard into a theater. Take a last look at the water moving under the fourth arch, and walk back toward the city.