The Jacobins, Assézat and the Augustins

Couvent des Jacobins

A double nave crowned by the palm-tree vault.

You're inside the oldest Dominican convent, the friars called Jacobins after their Paris house on the rue Saint-Jacques. The order was born in Toulouse in 1216, and this church, built across the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was once called the most beautiful Dominican church in Europe. Two equal naves run side by side, separated by a single row of columns down the middle. Walk to the east end.

The last column does not stop the way the others do; it opens into twenty-two ribs that fan out like a palm tree and vault the choir bay, twenty-eight metres overhead. The palm carries only the choir. The rest of the church stands on the central columns, and that is the whole trick. Under the altar rest the relics of Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican theologian, brought here in the fourteenth century.

For centuries the old university met in these rooms too. The church is free to enter, and a ticket of about 5 euros covers the cloister, chapter house, Saint-Antonin chapel and refectory. The site closes on Mondays, and Thursdays are reserved for booked groups, so a visitor arriving alone that day cannot get past the church. Stand beneath the palm a little longer.

Those twenty-two ribs have been holding this choir up for more than seven centuries.

Hôtel d'Assézat

A woad merchant's Renaissance palace and courtyard.

Step through the gateway and you're standing in the courtyard of a fortune made from blue dye. Pierre d'Assézat built this mansion between 1555 and 1562, and he paid for it with pastel, the woad plant that gave sixteenth-century Europe a blue cloth so prized that Toulouse merchants called the crop blue gold. Nicolas Bachelier designed the building, and his son Dominique finished it after Bachelier died on the job. Look at the two facades across from you.

On each one the classical orders climb floor by floor, Doric, then Ionic, then Corinthian, carved in pale stone against the pink brick. That is the language of the Italian Renaissance arriving in a city that still built everything in brick. The corner staircase tower rises high enough to be seen from the street, a merchant showing exactly how far his money reached. The courtyard is free to walk into, and it is the best part.

The Bemberg collection inside, five centuries of painting from Cranach to Bonnard, needs its own ticket.