The owner of the apartment we’re renting told us the town of Pézenas was worth a visit, so we drove about an hour to take a look. Arriving around lunch time, we had a mediocre meal at a restaurant chosen at random – I should have done some advance research!
Pézenas’s old town is filled with winding narrow alleys. Fortunately the Office du Tourisme offers a pamphlet for a self-guided walking tour: Without it we would surely have missed many of the attractive nooks and crannies in town. Like so many places we’ve visited so late in the year, and probably exacerbated by it being a Monday, almost nothing was open.
Just like in Italy, there are many niches with religious figures – just have to remember to look up!
While we enjoyed just walking around, many of the shops looked like they had interesting wares, many of them handmade. Pézenas would definitely be worth a visit during the high season.
Signs commemorate the homes of well-known (at least locally) people, but this one seems like a stretch: he’s famous for being a friend of Molière?
The building below seems to have a more legitimate claim to a plaque as the former headquarters of St Jean de Jérusalem [a Catholic order] in the 16th century, built on the site of the Templars house from the 11th century. (“Ancienne commanderie de St Jean de Jérusalem XVIeme siècle, Edifiée sur l’emplacement de la maison des Templiers XIème siècle”)
Beyond Our French Adventure 