Original subtitles

Hi I'm Rick Steves, continuing to explore more of the best of Europe.

This time we're in the northwest of France, enjoying Normandy

friendly locals, crepes, Camembert, waterlillies, and big abbeys.

Thanks for joining us.

While it's seen more than its share of war, today Normandy is a peaceful and welcoming place.

With its thought-provoking sights and memorials, delicious cuisine, and idyllic nature,

it's no wonder this region is such a popular get-away for nearby Parisians.

After exploring the half-timbered charm of Rouen,

we'll reflect on lilypads at Monet's garden, peek in on local craftspeople,

set up an easle at Honfleur,

enter Erik Satie's excentric musical mind

remember D-Day (and another invasion nine centuries earlier)

and take a pilgrim's hike to an enchanted abbey.

Of France's many regions, Normandy is strategically located across from England and handy to Paris.

From Rouen we side-trip to Giverny, travel to Bayeux,

and see the dramatic D-Day Beaches before finishing at Mont St. Michel.

But history of Normandy is filled with war.

Viking Norsemen who settled here in the 9th century gave Normandy its name.

The 7th duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, invaded England from these shores.

Joan of Arc, who rallied the French against the English, was burned at the stake in Normandy.

And on these beaches a WWII battle was fought that changed the course of history.

The stirring sights associated with each of these events turn many visitors into history buffs.

Nearly 1200 years ago, the Vikings made this town, Rouen, their capital.

William the Conqueror called it home before moving to England.

During the middle ages Rouen, with 40000 residents, was France's second largest city.

Only Paris was bigger.

In the 12th century, half of today's France was ruled by England.

Caught in the middle, Rouen walked a political tightrope between England and France for centuries.

And because Rouen was an important English base during the Hundred Years' War,

this is where Joan of Arc was burned.

Today Rouen mixes dazzling Gothic architecture and contemporary bustle beautifully.

It's a busy port with a pedestrian-friendly old town

and a grand cathedral standing as a reminder of the town's historic importance.

The spire was made of cast iron in the late 1800s

about the same time Eiffel was building his tower in Paris.

At nearly 500 feet, it's the tallest in France.

Rouen's ornate public clock has decorated the former city hall for 500 years.

Back then, just having an hour hand offered ample precision.

The lamb at the end of the hour hand is a reminder that wool was the source of Rouen's wealth.

And the artistic highlight

leaned way back, fills the underside of the arch with the good shepherd� and lots of sheep.

The thriving wool trade stoked Rouen's medieval building boom.

Because the chalky limestone quarried from the cliffs of the Seine River nearby, was so expensive

and it wasn't too great for building quality, i can actually mess it up with my thumb

and because the oak around here was so plentiful,

half-timbered buildings became a Rouen forte.

The oak beams provide the structural skeleton of the building.

The gaps were then filled in with a mix of clay, straw, and pebbles� and plastered over.

Wander the back lanes and peek into shops.

This flowery and pastel hat shop is the last of its kind in Rouen

the hat maker is considered a treasure by her devoted clientelle.

Just around the corner, Monsieur Augy welcomes shoppers to browse through his studio

and see Rouen's china (known as Faience) being made the traditional way.

First the clay is molded and carefully trimmed by hand.

After being fired, dipped in enamel, and dried, it's lovingly hand-painted.

A second firing gives it its characteristic glaze.

In the 1700s, Rouen had 18 factories churning out the popular product.

Today, the Augy family carries on the Fiaence tradition.

On the market square a cross marks the spot where Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake in the 15th century.

As the demoralized French were reeling under English occupation,

this teenager of supreme faith, after hearing divine voices,

won the confidence of the French people.

Dressed as a man, she was given an army,

and rallied her countrymen against their English invaders.

In 1431, 19-year-old Joan of Arc was taken by the English,

convicted of heresy and burned right here.

As the flames engulfed her, an English soldier said, �Oh, my God, we've killed a saint�.

Nearly 500 years later, Joan was made a saint� and he was proven correct.

Mid-way between Rouen and Paris, about an hour's drive away, is Giverny.

Claude Monet, the father of the Impressionist movement, spent his last 40 years here

finding inspiration in these gardens.

The colors of his cottage garden are like his brushstrokes

they seem untamed and slap-dash, but are part of a carefully composed mosaic.

He diverted a stream, made a pond,

filled it with water lilies and built a footbridge

which eventually became overgrown with wisteria.

Museums in Paris bloom with Monet's garden paintings.

Impressionism was a revolutionary movement in European art

the rage in the 1870s.

Many artists abandoned realism in favor of this innovative style which captured light,

glimmers and reflections.

Impressionist art evokes the subtlties of nature.

The artist, using short brushstrokes of different colors placed side by side

suggests shimmering light.

The true subject is not really the lilies, but the changing reflections on the surface of the pond.

As he grew older, Monet cropped the scene ever closer,

until there was no shoreline, no horizon, no sense of what's up or down.

For dinner, I'm joining my friend and fellow tour guide Sabine Leteinturier back in Rouen.

For what you'd expect to spend in a modest American restaurant,

we're enjoying the full, fun-loving ritual of fine dining in France.

This is classic Normandy cuisine

and tonight we're going to experince the four seas.

We're going to have the cream,

Camembert, cider.

and the cream you can find it right in the sauce

You have red wine, foie gras and creme.

and the sauce is something that's very important in the Normandy cuisine.

In a fine french meal, the main plate is followed by a cheese course, in this case cream gives way to Camembert,

which is only one of many tasty Normandy cheeses.

So all of this cheese really is from this region, from a few miles from here

I love this concept of eating locally.

You eat locally, it's distributed locally, and you just enjoy it locally.

The region is also famous for its apples,

which are savored as cider, or

Apple souffle with calvados.

The four season Normandy: cream, camembert, cider, calvados.

Our next stop is just down the road.

Honfleur escaped the bombs of World War II

and feels as picturesque as it looks.

Gazing at its snug harbor, it's easy to overlook the historic importance of this port.

This is where the Seine River meets the English Channel.

For over a thousand years, sailors have enjoyed Honfleur's ideal location.

While busy conquering England, William received supplies shipped from Honfleur.

And Canadians know Honfleur for Samuel de Champlain who sailed from here in 1608,

discovering the St. Lawrence Waterway and establishing Quebec City.

The harbor, once fortified with a wall and two gates, is now an easy-going marina.

Today's Honfleur, long eclipsed by the gargantuan port of Le Havre just across the Seine,

happily uses its past as a bar stool and sits on it.

Honfleur's Church of St. Catherine is worth a visit.

It was built by a community with plenty of boat builders and no cathedral architects.

If you fliped it, it would float.

When the first nave was built in the mid-1400s, it was immediately apparent they needed more space

so they built another.

Many consider Honfleur the birthplace of Impressionism.

Just as Monet once did, artists still come here to catch the light playing on the harborfront and reflecting in the water.

It was in places like this that the battle cry of the Impressionists

�Out of the studio and into the light!� was born.

Just down the street, visitors don headsets to explore the boyhood home of composer Erik Satie

which presents his music in a whimsical way.

Wandering from room to room, you enjoy fragments of Satie's music along with his life story.

Surreal images complement the music, reflecting how radical the parisian art scene was in the 1920s.

And for a musical finale, you get some exercise�

For lunch, we're harborfront at a cr�perie.

A fun specialty both here in Normandy and in neighboring Brittany is cr�pes.

Savory cr�pes are made with buckwheat and called galettes.

While plain-looking, they come filled with what you'd expect on a pizza or in an omelet.

Traditionally, cr�pes are washed down with hard and tasty cidre.

You can get it sweet or dry.

Our rooms are in a Chambre d'Hote� a French Bed & Breakfast.

Settling into a French home rather than a hotel, saves you money while getting you closer to the culture.

We're in the home of gregarious Madame Giaglis.

It's just the kind of place I seek out and recommend in my guidebooks.

She and her husband Antoine offer a welcoming lounge and six rooms�

each as inviting as the owners.

Distances in Normandy are short and, as long as you stick to the autoroute

well worth the tolls, you'll make very good time.

Our next stop is Bayeux.

Its Saturday morning and this normally sleepy square has erupted into a busy farmers' market.

The long tradition of those who grow it selling directly to those who eat it thrives throughout France.

And the food couldn't be fresher.

Bayeux's claim to fame is the Bayeux Tapestry which hung in this cathedral.

It's a 900-year old embroidery which tells the story of arguably the most memorable event of the Middle Ages

the pivitol Battle of Hastings in 1066.

The tapestry now hangs proudly in a museum just down the street.

Headsets narrate the 230-foot long cartoon telling the story of William the Conqueror

and the Battle of Hastings.

Don't worry� if you lose your place, you'll find supertitles in Latin.

England's King Edward was about to die without an heir.

The big question: Who would succeed him.

Harold, his English brother-in-law, or William, his French cousin?

King Edward chose the frenchman William. But when the king died, Harold grabbed the throne.

William, then known as William the Bastard, thought the throne was rightfully his.

So he prepared his army, gathering weapons and coats of mail and sailing from Normandy

across the English channel to the south coast of England.

He met Harold at the town of Hastings, where they fought a fierce 14-hour battle.

While the English fought valiantly, the Normans had an advantage: horses with stirrups.

Historians attribute their victory to these stirrups.

Extra details of the battle show up below

Here, dead soldiers are being stripped of their valuable armor.

Harold was killed, arrow in the eye� ouch ! and his Saxon forces were routed.

The end of the tapestry is lost but the end of the story is well known:

William, now �William the Conqueror� marched into London and claimed his throne.

Now he was both Duke of Normandy and King of England.

Bayeux, with a pleasant town center and only six miles from the D-Day beaches,

makes a great home base for visiting the area's sights.

Along the 75 miles of Atlantic coast nearby

you'll find countless memories of the largest military operation in history.

It was on these beautiful beaches, at the crack of dawn, June 6, 1944,

that the Allies finally gained a foothold in France and Nazi Europe began to crumble.

During the D-Day invasion, American troops and their allied partners

courageously assaulted the German-occupied cliffs using grappling hooks and ladders.

While ultimately victorious, they suffered horrendous losses.

Smashed German bunkers and bomb craters remain,

only hinting at the unimagineable carnage and chaos of that momentous day.

The small town of Arromanches was ground zero for the D-Day invasion.

Almost overnight, the allies erected an immense pre-fab port enabling them to begin their victorious push to Berlin.

Imagine the building of this incredible harbour.

Seventeen old ships, steamed across the English Channel and were sunk

bow to stern, creating a four mile long protective breakwater.

Then with massive contrete platforms and roads floating on pontoons nearly a mile long

the harbour was completed.

Within six days 300,000 allied troops and all their equipment had established a beachhead here in France.

And in less than a year�the war was over.

Today, sixty years later, the town, with its beach combers, holiday trinkets, and families at play,

still seems to celebrate the allied victory.

Peace came at a huge price. The invasion cost over 4000 allied lives.

The American Cemetery at St. Laurent crowns a bluff just above Omaha Beach

and the eye of the D-Day storm.

Thousands of tombstones glow in memory of Americans

who gave their lives here to help free Europe.

The bluff overlooks the piece of Normandy beach called �the portal of freedom.�

While tranquil now, for those of us who weren't there, the horror of that day is impossible to imagine.

From the memorial, with a bronze statue symbolizing the spirit of American's youth

a peaceful sea of crosses invites those visiting to wander

and ponder the sacrifice so many brave men made in the cause of freedom.

Immediately after the war, all the bodies were buried in temporary graves.

In the 1950s, this cemetary was established

the families decided if the bodies should remain with their comrades or be brought home.

Officers are disproportionately represented.

Their families figured they'd prefer to be buried next to the men they commanded

and with whom they fought and died.

Nearby, another military cemetery is the resting place of 21,000 German soldiers.

The centerpiece symbolizes German mothers and fathers who lost their children.

The site, glum, with two graves per simple marker and dark crosses that huddle together in groups of five

is a somber reminder that many young Germans were victims of Hitler as well.

The best WWII museum in France is in Caen

the first big city freed by the allies.

Officially named the Memorial for Peace, it puts the Battle for Normandy in a broader context.

You start with a downward spiral stroll, tracing (almost psychoanalyzing) the path Europe followed

from the end of World War I to the rise of fascism and into World War II.

You'll get a thorough look at how World War II was fought

from individual weapons

to floating airports

to the two-ton V1, the unmanned predecessor of today's smart bombs

to the D-Day landings.

The Cold War wing gives an overview of the bipolar world that followed WWII.

It gives insights into the battle waged by the USSR and the USA for the hearts and minds of their people

until the collapse of Communism in 1989.

The memorial then takes you beyond war.

The Gallery of Nobel Peace Prizes celebrates the irrepressible human spirit.

It honors the courageous and too-often-inconspicuous work of people like Albert Schweitzer,

Mother Teresa,

Martin Luther King,

and many lesser known champions of justice

who understand that true peace is more than just an absence of war.

The contemplative finale is a walk through the U.S. Armed Forces Memorial Garden.

Plaques honor the sacrifice young American soldiers made for Europe.

The sight of children enjoying this memorial as a playground captures the spirit

of the quote etched in the pavement:

�From the heart of our land flows the blood of our youth,

given to you in the name of freedom.�

Our next stop, an hour's drive away, is Mont St. Michel.

For over a thousand years, the silhouette of this island abbey has sent pilgrim's weary spirits soaring.

Today it does the same for tourists.

Mont St. Michel, which through the ages has been among the top pilgrimage sites in Christendom,

floats like a mirage on the horizon.

The vast Bay of Mont St. Michel,

which turns into a mudflat at low tide, has long played a key role here.

Since the sixth century, hermit monks came here in search of solitude.

The word �hermit� comes from an ancient Greek word meaning �desert.�

The closest thing to a desert in this part of Europe was the sea.

Imagine the �desert� this bay provided as the first monk climbed that rock

trying to get closer to God.

The rock, capped by an abbey, was even more isolated by its mythic tides.

Pilgrims crossed the mudflat quickly and carefully

knowing that the sea swept in �at the speed of a galloping horse.�

In the late 1800s, a road was built, connecting the island to the mainland

and letting pilgrims come and go without hip boots

The town of Mont St. Michel, with only 30 residents, entertains over 2 million visitors a year.

Its main street, lined with shops and hotels leading up to the abbey, is grotesquely commercial.

It's some consolation to remember that, even back in the Middle Ages, this was a retail gauntlet,

with stalls selling souvenir medallions, candles, and fast food� like omelets.

An island specialty is quick, tasty, and extremely fluffy omelets.

They were popular for eat-and-run pilgrims who needed to beat the tide

and they remain a hit with visitors today.

Enjoy the show as cooks make sure the traditional beat goes on.

You can skirt the main street crowds and enjoy Mont St. Michel's fine 15th-century fortifications

by following the ramparts up to the abbey.

They were built to defend against a new weapon: the cannon.

Rather than tall, they were low, to make a smaller target.

While the English took all the rest of Normandy, they never conquered this well-fortified island.

Because of its stubborn success against the English through all those years,

Mont St. Michel became a symbol of French national identity.

As you climb the stairs to the abbey, imagine the pilgrims and monks

who for centuries have climbed these same stone steps.

Mont St. Michel has been a holy place since the year 708, when, according to legend,

when the Archangel Michael apperaed to a local bishop in a vision, and convinced him to build here.

This was an immense building project evolving over many centuries.

It was a marvel, a medieval skyscraper, built upon a rock�

crowned by a gilded statue of Saint Michael.

The bay stretches from Normandy to Brittany.

The river marks the historic border between the two lands.

Brittany and Normandy have long vied for Mont St. Michel.

In fact, the river used to pass on the other side, making the abbey part of Brittany.

Today Mont St. Michel is just barely, but thoroughly, part of Normandy.

The centerpiece of this extraordinary abbey is its church.

While it's mostly 11th century Romanesque (with round arches and small windows),

the apse behind the altar was built later.

Its Gothic pointed arches and bigger windows fill the sanctuary with light.

Sitting atop all this heavy construction, like a delicate flower

is the abbey's cloister.

In this peaceful zone, which connected various rooms,

monks would grow vegetables and medicinal herbs.

They'd meditate and read the Bible.

And, for thoughtful travelers today, this abbey still inspires.

So much of France's rich heritage survives,

and here in Normandy perhaps better than any other part of the country, it inspires us all.

Thanks for joining us.

And vive la France!

I'm Rick Steves. Until next time

keep on travelin'

Au revoir.