Fotografi a Digione e i climats di Borgogna

Dijon was the capital of the Dukes of Burgundy, and the city still looks the part. The Palais des Ducs et des États stands behind the Place de la Libération, a half-moon of pale stone laid out by Hardouin-Mansart's office in the 1680s, closed to cars and swept clean — at dawn it is empty and the wet pavement doubles the facades. Behind it rises the fifteenth-century Tour Philippe le Bon, forty-six metres and a few hundred steps to a terrace that puts the whole tiled roofscape and, on a clear day, the Jura at your feet; the climb is guided and needs booking. From the square the old town runs north into lanes of half-timbered houses, carved doorways and glazed Burgundian tiles: Rue des Forges, Rue Verrerie, Rue de la Chouette. The city has set a trail of small brass owls into the pavement to link them, and it ends at the one everybody rubs for luck — the worn stone owl on the north flank of the Gothic church of Notre-Dame, under the Jacquemart clock and a facade bristling with rows of gargoyles added in the nineteenth century. The historic centre has been on the UNESCO list since 2015, listed with the climats — the named vineyard plots that begin almost at the city limit. Marsannay-la-Côte, eight kilometres south, is where the Route des Grands Crus starts, and from there the road runs through Fixin, Gevrey-Chambertin and Vosne-Romanée. Time it: the vines are bare from November to April, green from June, and gold in the last days of September and the first half of October.