Day-trips from Paris Travel Video Guide

Day-trips from Paris Travel Itinerary

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You're unlikely to exhaust the delights of Paris during your stay, but should you feel like a break from the bustle of the city, you'll find a number of attractive destinations within easy reach of the capital. The region that surrounds Paris - known as the Ile de France - and the borders of the neighbouring provinces are studded with large-scale chateaux , many set in beautiful grounds. Many have played an integral part in French history - none more so than Versailles , an overwhelming monument to the reign of Louis XIV. On a slightly more intimate scale, Fontainebleau , with its Italianate decoration, is easy to appreciate; and Chantilly has a wonderful collection of Italian paintings and a gorgeous medieval Book of Hours. You can also enjoy the country air by taking a stroll in the gardens, parks and forests that surround the chateaux.

Two of France's most important church buildings can be easily reached from Paris in a day: the awe-inspiring cathedral of Chartres and the basilica of St-Denis , predating Chartres and representing the first breakthrough in Gothic art; it is also the burial place of almost all the French

kings.

The River Seine winds northwest out of Paris through some idyllic countryside. In the nineteenth century, it attracted and inspired many artists. The Ile de Chatou , an island in the river Seine, was especially popular with artists and has a small museum of Impressionist memorabilia within a riverside restaurant that was once frequented by Monet, Renoir and others. Further west is Monet's beautiful garden at Giverny, the inspiration for all his water-lily canvases.

Your Tips For Day-trips from Paris

• Loire France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The density of chateaux and all their great Renaissance intrigues and associations can prove quite intimidating, but if you pick your castles selectively, rid yourself of a sense of duty to guided tours and spend days on river banks with supplies of cheese, fruit and white Loire wines, the Loire can be one of the most enjoyable of all French regions. - France
  

• North France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  When conjuring up exotic holiday locations, you're unlikely to light upon the north of France. - France
  

• Burgundy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Peaceful, rural Burgundy is one of the most prosperous regions in modern France, but for centuries its powerful dukes remained independent of the French crown. - France
  

• Alps France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Rousseau wrote in his Confessions , "I need torrents, rocks, pine trees, dark forests, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices at my elbow to give me a good fright", and he certainly found what he was looking for in the Alps . - France
  

• Poitou-Charentes and the Atlantic Coast France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  News-stands selling Sud-Ouest remind you where you are: this is not the Mediterranean, certainly, but in summer the quality of the light, the warm air, the fields of sunflowers and the shuttered siesta-silence of the farmhouses give you the first exciting promises of the south. - France
  

• Paris France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  It's little wonder that so many wistful songs have been penned over the years about France's capital, Paris . - France
  

• Dordogne Limousin and Lot France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The land covered in this section forms a rough oval bordered to the east by the uplands of the Massif Central and to the west by the Atlantic plains. - France
  

• Languedoc France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Languedoc is more an idea than a geographical entity. - France
  

• Corsica France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Around one-and-three-quarter million people visit Corsica each year, drawn by a climate that's mild even in winter and by some of the most astonishingly diverse landscapes in Europe. - France
  

• Cote dAzur France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  The Cote d'Azur polarizes opinions like few other places in France. - France
  

• Brittany France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  No one area - and certainly no one city or town - in Brittany encapsulates the character of the province; that lies in its people and in its geographical unity. - France
  

• Rhone valley and Provence France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Of all the areas of France, Provence is the most irresistible. - France
  

• Pyrenees France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Basque-speaking, wet and green in the west; craggy, snowy, Gascon-influenced in the middle; dry, Mediterranean and Catalan-speaking in the east - the Pyrenees are physically beautiful, culturally varied and considerably less developed than the Alps. - France
  

• Massif Central France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  One of the loveliest spots on earth ? a country without roads, without guides, without any facilities for locomotion, where every discovery must be conquered at the price of danger or fatigue ? a soil cut up with deep ravines, crossed in every way by lofty walls of lava, and furrowed by numerous torrents . - France
  

• Normandy France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  Though now firmly incorporated into the French mainstream, the seaboard province of Normandy has a history of prosperous independence as one of the crucial powers of medieval Europe. - France
  

• Alsace-Lorraine and the Jura mountains France Travel Videos
  France Travel Itinerary
  France's eastern frontier provinces, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comte , where the Jura mountains lie, have had a complex and tumultuous history. - France