Nîmes

The amphitheatre is still working. Two thousand years after Roman engineers set each stone, the arena at Nîmes, in southern France, fills with sand, spectators and noise — bullfights in summer, concerts in the warm evenings — the limestone tiers absorbing it all with the patience of a building that has seen everything. Across the city the Maison Carrée is quieter: a Roman temple so exactly proportioned it looks like a mathematical proof in stone.

Nîmes was a major Roman colony and it keeps its monuments in working order: the first-century arena, among the best kept in the Roman world, still stages the ferias and concerts, and the Maison Carrée, the temple built for the grandsons of Augustus, is the most complete Roman temple standing anywhere, its columns and pediment intact after two millennia. Facing it across the square, Norman Foster's Carré d'Art, a glass gallery of contemporary art, was built to hold the conversation between ancient and new. The Jardins de la Fontaine climb the hillside above the town around the spring the Romans made sacred, with the Temple of Diana in the greenery and the Tour Magne watchtower at the summit. And the city gave the world's most-worn fabric its name — serge de Nîmes, denim — though the jeans connection is now more etymological than visible.