Champollion's birthplace in medieval Quercy — golden sandstone and the Rosetta Stone connection
Figeac is one of the most beautiful medieval towns in southwest France — a golden sandstone Quercy town on the Célé river, almost entirely unspoiled, where Jean-François Champollion was born in 1790 and went on to decode the Rosetta Stone and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Musée Champollion has one of the finest Egyptology collections outside Paris, and the Place des Écritures in the town centre has a giant version of the Rosetta Stone embedded in the paving, surrounded by scripts in 50 languages.
Figeac was a major abbey town in the Middle Ages — the Abbey of Saint-Sauveur was founded in the 9th century and controlled much of the region. The town's golden-age prosperity shows in its extraordinary stock of 13th–14th-century sandstone townhouses (soleilhos) with arched loggias and terraces unique to Quercy. Champollion (1790–1832) was educated partly in Figeac before moving to Grenoble; his cracking of the hieroglyphic code in 1822 was one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the 19th century. The square bearing his name has a full-scale replica of the Rosetta Stone.