Third stop, and the first with proper sun. After the grey of the north coast and Reims, Strasbourg's pink Vosges sandstone came as a shock, the whole cathedral front changing colour as the afternoon moved across it. Time was short again, so I stayed close to the Grande Île: the cathedral, the lanes around it, the canals of La Petite France with their half-timbered houses leaning in over the water.

Strasbourg sits between two countries and has belonged to both. You hear it before you see it, the voices in the square shifting from French to German and back, and you see it in the skyline, where a Gothic spire that was once the tallest thing on earth shares the view with the glass domes of the European Parliament. The cathedral's single spire is the result of money and will running out before the second one was built, and the city has been the better for the asymmetry ever since.

Victor Hugo called the façade a gigantic and delicate marvel. He was not exaggerating.

Inside: the great rose window, the astronomical clock with its procession of apostles and crowing cockerel, and on the south portal the tympanum that tells the entire Passion in carved stone, the first known to do so. That tympanum became the first Galerio film, and it is below with the rest.