Saint-Pierre
Medieval market square lined with carved stone faces watching from centuries-old facades.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Saint-Pierre in Bordeaux looks up at the mascarons, the carved stone faces staring down from shopfronts and window ledges around the old market square, and asks how a city carved three thousand of them while losing track of almost every name behind the chisel. It follows the word itself back through Arabic and Italian, and the eighteenth-century building boom that put a face over nearly every door, naming the rare known sculptor, Jacques Verberckt, alongside the anonymous stonecutters paid by the metre. Next time you pass a doorway here, it's worth tilting your head back.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Porte Dijeaux
Neoclassical eighteenth-century arch replacing a medieval fortified gate on a busy pedestrian shopping street.
Place du Parlement
Elegant eighteenth-century market square framed by golden stone facades and a neo-rococo fountain.
Porte d'Aquitaine
Triumphal stone arch carved with sea gods and royal arms, raised for an infant Bourbon duke.
impasse rue Neuve
Medieval dead-end alley hiding Bordeaux's oldest gothic facade and a philosopher's wife's family home.
Galerie Bordelaise
Diagonal nineteenth-century covered passage of marble columns and iron gates, carved with horns of plenty.
Place de la Bourse
Neoclassical riverside square of twin curved facades, once crowned by a royal statue melted down in revolution.