The Town
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Autun

Traces of the Roman period are still much in evidence. Two of the city's four Roman gates survive: Porte St-André, spanning rue de la Croix-Blanche in the northeast, and Porte d'Arroux in Faubourg d'Arroux in the northwest. In a field just across the River Arroux stands a lofty section of brick wall known as the Temple of Janus, which was probably part of the sanctuary of some Gallic deity, while on the east side of the town, on avenue du 2ème-Dragon just off the Dijon road, you can see the remains of what was the largest Roman theatre in Gaul, with a capacity of fifteen thousand – in itself a measure of Autun's importance at that time. It's not an evocative site – the remaining seats now overlook a football pitch – but in July and August its authenticity is enhanced by the performances of a play in which six hundred locals, dressed in period costume, reconstruct the Gallo-Roman past of the town. An artificial lake below the football pitch, the Plan d'eau du Vallon, provides the usual watersports.

The most enigmatic of the Gallo-Roman remains in the region is the Pierre de Couhard, off Faubourg St-Pancrace to the southeast of the town. It's a 27-metre-tall stone pyramid situated on the site of one of the city's necropolises, thought to date from the first century, and most probably either a tomb or a cenotaph.

The influence of the monuments of this Roman past is very much in evidence in Autun's great twelfth-century Cathédrale St-Lazare, built nearly a thousand years after the Romans had gone. It stands in the highest and best fortified corner of the town, and although its external appearance has been much altered by the addition of Gothic tower, spire and side chapels in the fifteenth century, and the twin towers flanking the front in the nineteenth, the Roman influence is very clear inside. The church's greatest claim to artistic fame lies in its sculptures, the work of Gislebertus, generally accepted as one of the greatest Romanesque sculptors.

The tympanum of the Last Judgement above the west door bears his signature – Gislebertus hoc fecit ("Gislebertus made this") – beneath the feet of Christ. To his left are depicted the Virgin Mary, the saints and the apostles, with the saved rejoicing below them; to the right the Archangel Michael disputes souls with Satan, who tries to cheat by leaning on the scales, while the damned despair beneath. During the eighteenth century the local clergy decided the tympanum was an inferior work and plastered it over, saving it from almost certain destruction during the Revolution. The head of Christ, however, had been hacked off, and was only rediscovered – hiding anonymously in the collection of the Musée Rolin – in 1948.

The interior of the cathedral, whose pilasters and arcading were modelled on the Roman architecture of the city's gates, was also decorated by Gislebertus, who himself carved most of the capitals. Conveniently for anyone wanting a close look, some of the finest are now exhibited in the old chapter library, up the stairs on the right of the choir, among them a beautiful Flight into Egypt and Adoration of the Magi. A fine canvas of the Matyrdom of St Symphorien, by Ingres, dominates the south transept.

Just outside the cathedral on rue des Bancs, the Musée Rolin (daily except Tues: April–Sept 9.30am–noon & 1.30–6pm; Oct–March 10am–noon & 2–5pm; €4) occupies a Renaissance hôtel built by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor of Philippe le Bon, and is definitely worth a look. In addition to interesting Gallo-Roman pieces, the star attractions are Gislebertus's representation of Eve as an unashamedly sensual nude – one of the few pieces surviving from a tympanum that didn't make it – and the Maître de Moulins' brilliantly coloured Nativity. At the highest corner of the ramparts' course, just south of the cathedral, the Tour des Ursulines is a last remnant of the once-powerful fortress of Rivault built by the Dukes of Burgundy in the twelfth century; the statue of the Virgin on the top was added in the mid-nineteenth century.