Provins

The galleries begin beneath the medieval square and do not stop — merchants' cellars, vaults and passages cut into the rock under the whole upper town. Provins, in northern France, was one of the principal fair towns of Champagne, a place where the wealth of medieval trade built walls, towers and a rose industry that still scents the town every June, an hour from Paris and centuries away.

In the 1100s and 1200s the Champagne fairs were the trading floor of Europe, and Provins was one of their principal towns, under the protection of the Counts of Champagne; the walls and gates, the market squares and the Tour César — the twelfth-century keep on its mound above the town — all date from that prosperity, and UNESCO listed the whole medieval town in 2001. Beneath it the underground galleries, once storage for the merchants, are opened on guided tours. The roses came back from the Crusades — the red Rosa gallica the Count of Champagne brought back — and Provins has grown them ever since, turning them into jam, honey, sweets and scent; the June rose festival fills the town with them. In summer the medieval shows bring jousting and falconry into the ramparts, and hypocras, the spiced wine of the fairs, is still poured.