Fontainebleau and Barbizon: Forest and Art

Two days between royal forest and art history, an hour from Paris. The trip opens at the chateau de Fontainebleau, home to thirty-four sovereigns across eight centuries, with its fifteen hundred rooms and Renaissance gardens, then the Franchard gorges, a sandstone chaos where bouldering was invented in the late nineteenth century and where colour-coded circuits still guide climbers. Barbizon, the village where Millet and Theodore Rousseau founded the school that opened the way to Impressionism, keeps the Ganne inn and their studios; Milly-la-Foret adds the chapel decorated by Cocteau. The forest holds more than three hundred kilometres of waymarked Denecourt trails, the oldest in France, laid out from 1837.