Nantes
— — a Verne city, still building its machines.
Not only on a wall.
“A river city with one foot in Brittany and one in the Atlantic trade. The dukes' castle still holds the old quarter; a forty-foot mechanical elephant walks the former shipyards on the Île de Nantes most afternoons. Jules Verne was born here in 1828 and the city has kept his appetite for engineered wonder.
Nantes, 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.
Nantes sits on the Loire River in western France, about fifty kilometres inland from the Atlantic. It is the prefecture of the Loire-Atlantique department and the sixth-largest city in France, with a metropolitan population near 670,000. Historically the capital of the Duchy of Brittany, Nantes was attached to the Pays de la Loire region in 1956. The medieval Château des ducs de Bretagne anchors the old town and houses the Nantes History Museum across thirty-two rooms. The river itself was partially filled in the 1930s; the old arms now read as boulevards.
The civic calendar turns on Le Voyage à Nantes, a summer art trail that runs each year from early July through early September and threads roughly sixty installations along a green line painted onto the city's pavements. The Machines de l'île on the former shipyard operates the Grand Éléphant year-round, a twelve-metre walking sculpture that carries up to fifty passengers in slow looping walks. The Edict of Nantes, signed here by Henry IV on April 13, 1598, granted French Protestants protected status and is remembered each spring at the château.
The Château des ducs de Bretagne wears two centuries on one footprint: a fifteenth-century white-tufa residence inside a seventeenth-century granite curtain wall. Anne of Brittany was born in the older keep in 1477; her marriage to Charles VIII began the union of Brittany with France. The Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, two streets east, rises in flamboyant Gothic limestone and took 457 years to complete, from 1434 to 1891. Both stand within a ten-minute walk of the Bouffay quarter and its slate-roofed timber houses.