One Century, One Quarter

Place Royale

Crucy's 1786 square and its 1865 fountain full of river figures.

This square was the hinge of the whole project. Place Royale was designed in 1786 by Mathurin Crucy, the city architect who laid out this quarter on land Graslin had begun buying a decade earlier. The buildings around you were meant to read as one uniform neoclassical frame. But the center arrived much later.

The fountain was inaugurated on 16 March 1865, after nearly eighty years of debate about what should stand here, and its architect, Henri-Théodore Driollet, had died in 1863, two years before the water was turned on. Look at the white marble figure on top: that is Nantes herself, a crowned woman who once held a trident. Below her, the Loire and four of its tributaries pour water from their urns, and eight bronze genies ride dolphins around the basin. A student stole the trident in May 1968, and thefts became recurrent; wooden replacements were taken repeatedly, the statue's hand broke, and the trident was removed for good in 2007.

The original sits in the reserves of the city's history museum, not on display. The message survives it: this was a port town showing off the river that paid for the place.

Passage Pommeraye

A three-level arcade climbing a nine-meter slope under glass.

The covered arcade you're in is often called the most beautiful in Europe, and it is a staircase before it is a shop. The passage was the idea of Louis Pommeraye, a notary who left his practice in 1836, and his partner Charles Guilloux. They gave the architects Jean-Baptiste Buron and Hippolyte Durand-Gasselin one problem to solve: a slope of more than nine meters between the lower town around the Bourse and the upper town around the theater. The answer was this central stair, cast by the Voruz foundries, climbing past three levels of galleries under a glass roof.

When the passage opened in July 1843, it was built with sixty-six shops, lit by gas, and Nantes had never seen shop windows like them. The decoration is deliberately loud: fluted columns, Renaissance motifs, and statues of the arts and industries that made the city rich. The surrealists adored this staircase, and Jacques Demy filmed Lola here in 1961. One practical note: the gates close at eight in the evening every day they open; on Sundays only the opening time differs, at nine in the morning, and on 1 May the passage stays shut.