Cité de Carcassonne
— — a fortress that decided to be a city.
Not only on a wall.
“A walled medieval city on a hill above the Aude, restored across the second half of the nineteenth century by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Three kilometres of double rampart and fifty-two towers enclose a small living quarter — shops, the basilica, the comtal château. The studio paints the towers the colour they go in the last hour of sun.
Cité de Carcassonne, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Cité de Carcassonne stands on a hill above the Aude River in the Aude department of Occitanie, southern France. The fortified ensemble runs about three kilometres of double walls with 52 towers enclosing the medieval upper town, set above the newer ville basse founded in 1240 across the river. The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997 as an exceptional example of a medieval fortified town. The fortifications combine Gallo-Roman, Visigothic, and thirteenth-century French royal construction.
The walls are local limestone and sandstone, much of it reset during the nineteenth-century restoration led by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc beginning in 1853. The conical slate roofs on the towers are his addition and remain controversial among purists, who note they are northern French in form rather than Mediterranean. The Château Comtal at the western edge of the cité was built by the Trencavel viscounts in the twelfth century and reinforced after the city fell to the French crown during the Albigensian Crusade in 1209.
The Cité is open daily and free to enter on foot through the Porte Narbonnaise. Tickets are required for the Château Comtal and the rampart walk, managed by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux. The medieval quarter holds about fifty permanent residents and a small concentration of hotels, shops, and restaurants. Most day visitors arrive by train into Carcassonne station and climb fifteen minutes from the lower town. The annual Festival de Carcassonne runs through July and uses the open-air theatre against the inner walls.