Marseille Cathedral

This guide to Marseille Cathedral traces why a nineteenth-century city planning its rebuilt harbor at La Joliette chose to raise an enormous new cathedral almost in the shipping channel's sightline. You'll hear about Napoleon III laying the foundation stone in 1852 and the decades of construction that followed, plus how the building earned its nickname among locals for its striped stone walls. It's worth pausing at the harbor side to take in the scale planners intended arriving sailors to see.