The City of God's Good Lantern — where Saint-Étienne Cathedral holds more stained glass than any Gothic building on earth (including Marc Chagall's green Jacob wrestling an angel), the Moselle and Seille meet at the oldest triumphal arch in Gaul, and Centre Pompidou-Metz rivals Paris for contemporary art
Metz (120,000; metro 390,000) in the Grand Est is one of France's most underrated historic cities at the confluence of the Moselle and Seille rivers. The Cathédrale Saint-Étienne (Gothic, 13th–16th century) has 6,496 square metres of stained glass — the largest area of stained glass of any cathedral in the world — including windows by Marc Chagall (1960s) in the ambulatory. The Centre Pompidou-Metz (opened 2010, designed by Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines) is the most ambitious satellite of the Paris Centre Pompidou: a spectacular latticed white tent roof over three galleries drawing on the…
Divodurum Mediomatricorum was one of the largest cities in Roman Gaul — its amphitheater (50,000 capacity), temples, and aqueduct made it a major provincial capital; the Porte des Allemands (a fortified 13th-century city gate on Roman foundations) and the Place d'Armes atop the Roman forum survive. The city became a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire (10th century) and a major centre of early Carolingian Christianity — the scriptorium of Metz produced some of the finest illuminated manuscripts of the 9th century. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), Metz became the capital of t…