The Old Town and the Parliament Quarter

Jardin de Ville

A duke's garden turned public park, with a bandstand under the old plane trees.

You're standing in a garden the city bought in 1719 and opened to the public, and the bandstand over your head is the second one on this spot: a stand for musicians went up in 1874, and the kiosk that replaced it in 1886 is what you see now. The ground under it is older than either. Until 1620 this was a meadow outside the Roman walls, the Près de la Trésorerie, where fairs too big for the market square set up their stalls; Catherine de Médicis is said to have walked here during a stay in the city. Then François de Bonne, Duke of Lesdiguières and governor of the Dauphiné, built his town house along the western edge and turned the meadow into his own garden, with terraces, orange trees in tubs, and a bronze Hercules long said to be his portrait. Around nine hundred trees were planted once the city took it over; about a hundred stand in the garden today, planes, limes and chestnuts, mostly in the wooded half to the south. That wood is why this corner of the old town has room in it.

Fontaine Lavalette

The old grain square, its 1820s water tower and four bronze dolphins.

Place Grenette was Grenoble's main square from the 1600s, when it was still called the place du Breuil, and the business done here was grain and cattle rather than coffee. Now look at the middle of it. The Lavalette water tower was inaugurated in 1824, in the years when the marquis de Lavalette was mayor and Grenoble was getting its first network of piped water. Two basins are stacked one above the other, carved in the pale stone of Sassenage, and four bronze dolphins carry cherubs on their backs at the base; the dolphin is the emblem of the Dauphiné.

The bronze is by Victor Sappey, a sculptor from this city. The jet can reach twenty-two metres, which is worth watching on a windy morning. The name Grenette points at the grain that filled the square, and the fountain arrived when a market place was expected to look like something as well as sell something.