| Cours de l'Intendance, a street lined with chic shops, links place de la Comédie with café-lined place Gambetta, a pivotal square for the city's museums, shops and the cathedral. Once a majestic space conceived as an architectural whole in the time of Louis XV, place Gambetta's house fronts are arcaded at street level and decorated with rows of carved masks. In the middle of the square a valiant attempt at an English garden adds some welcome relief, belying the fact that the guillotine lopped three hundred heads here at the time of the Revolution. In one corner stands the eighteenth-century arch of the Porte Dijeaux, an old city gate. South of place Gambetta is the Cathédrale St-André (Mon–Sat 7.30–11.30am & 2–6/6.30pm), whose most eye-catching feature is the great upward sweep of the twin steeples over the north transept, an effect heightened by the adjacent but separate bell tower, the fifteenth-century Tour Pey-Berland (June–Sept daily 10am–6.30pm; Oct–May Tues–Sun 10am–noon & 2–5pm; €3.81). The interior of the cathedral, begun in the twelfth century, is not particularly interesting, apart from the choir, which provides one of the few complete examples of the florid late Gothic style known as Rayonnant, and the north transept door and the Porte Royale to the right, which feature some fine carving. The cream of Bordeaux's museums is to be found scattered in the streets around the cathedral. Directly behind the classical Hôtel de Ville, formerly Archbishop Rohan's palace, the Musée des Beaux-Arts (daily except Tues 11am–6pm; €4) has a small but worthy selection of European fine art, featuring works by Reynolds, Titian, Rubens, Matisse and Marquet (a native of the city), as well as Delacroix's superb painting of La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi. More engaging, however, is the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Mon & Wed–Fri 11am–6pm, Sat & Sun 2–6pm; €4), two blocks north on rue Bouffard and housed in a handsome eighteenth-century house. The extensive collection includes some beautiful, mainly French, porcelain and faïence, period furniture, glass, miniatures, Barye animal sculptures and prints of the city in its maritime heyday. Continuing to circle clockwise round the cathedral, you'll pass the Centre National Jean-Moulin (Tues–Fri 11am–6pm, Sat & Sun 2–6pm; free), a moderately interesting museum dedicated to the local Resistance, before reaching the imaginatively laid-out Musée d'Aquitaine, on cours Pasteur (Tues–Sun 11am–6pm; €4), one of the city's best museums. A stimulating variety of objects and types of display emphasizes regional ethnography and covers the three main facets of the region's development: maritime, commercial and agricultural. Drawings and writings of the period enable you to see why eighteenth-century Bordeaux was so extolled by contemporary writers, who compared it to Paris. It's also worth taking a look at the section on the wine trade before venturing off on a vineyard tour in the region. A couple of blocks east, rue St-James is straddled by a heavy Gothic tower, the fifteenth-century Grosse Cloche, originally part of the medieval town hall.
| 
