Porte Cailhau

This guide to Porte Cailhau in Bordeaux opens with a question about the low stone lintel above its doorway, and the king it was built to honor: Charles the Eighth, whose obsession with Italy drove him across the Alps to seize Naples and, in 1495, fight his exhausted army home from the battle of Fornovo. You'll hear why Bordeaux's jurats raised this triumphal arch for a campaign that looked more like survival than conquest, and why the tower beside it leans slightly on the marshy river silt beneath the Garonne. Look closely at that lintel before you pass under it.