French connection. The Guardian Traveller

Good evening, or should that be Bonsoir à tous! Because all eyes will be on France, and in particular Paris, over the next few weeks as the Olympic Games get underway. According to a report this week, an estimated 10 million visitors will converge on Paris for the 33rd Summer Olympic Games.
Francophiles should be braced for even longer queues then at the Louvre, Musée D’Orsay, the Pompidou Centre and other artistic big hitters. But with something like 140 museums, there’s no shortage of alternative cultural opportunities in the City of Light.
This week we’ve highlighted some of the quirkier, overlooked options, including La Cinémathèque Française, which is dedicated to the life and work of Georges Méliès, a hero to generations of film-makers, including Martin Scorsese, whose film Hugo is based on the cinematic pioneer.
Paris is also the fashion capital of the world, so naturally there’s a museum dedicated to haute couture with a collection of more than 200,000 pieces housed in an exquisite beaux-arts-style building, the Palais Galliera.
And then there’s the Museum of the Liberation of Paris, which opened in 2019 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the overthrow of Nazi occupation.
Further afield, we head to a region of France that is very familiar to British holidaymakers in the Dordogne, but explore a town that is perhaps less well known. Périgueux can be reached by train from Paris in about four and a half hours, but feels a world away from the big city. They even speak a different language there - Occitan.
Author Fiona Sampson describes Périgueux as a ”flâneur of a town”, referring to its relaxed way of life. She lived in a hamlet in the area up until Brexit, and writes about “an unusual, old-fashioned urban-rural community” ruled by “the traditions of modest self-sufficiency: a house cow, a drying rack for maize, vegetable gardens, geese in the yard under the walnut trees.”
And she concludes that “this is life off the beaten track”. As are our other writers’ choices of escapes, from Brittany to the Basque coast, and from the Rhône-Alpes to the Côte Bleue near Marseille.
Bon voyage!