Lille Audio Tours

Lille sits on a linguistic and cultural fault line that has shaped every building in the old town. The Vieux-Lille neighborhood, clustered around the Place aux Oignons and the Rue de la Monnaie, is built in the Flemish Baroque style: stepped gables, brick facades in terracotta and cream, ornate window surrounds, and a general richness of surface that distinguishes it immediately from anything south of the border. The city was Spanish, then French, Flemish in sympathy, and French again after 1668, and each transition left architectural deposits that the following administration found too expensive to demolish.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts on the Place de la Republique holds the largest collection of paintings in France outside the Louvre, a claim that surprises visitors who expect to find a provincial museum.

The Flemish and Dutch masters are particularly strong: works by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens sit alongside a Goya and a collection of 17th-century maps that are excellent as objects even for non-cartographers. The museum also has one of the better collections of 19th-century French sculpture outside Paris.