At work last night, I spotted a postcard sent from France, from the town of Rocamadour. It was a very picturesque scene, and you can see it by clicking here and scrolling down to the little guidebook to Rocamadour. That is the exact picture that was on the postcard. Unfortunately, the picture is very tiny, so you can't see much detail.
As you can see, the town was built on the side of a steep cliff, most likely for defensive reasons. I certainly wouldn't want to be at the bottom of the cliff when it rains! I suspect that the property values get higher the closer to the top of the cliff one goes. Highlight: The churches with paintings and inscriptions of pilgrimages and what is claimed to be a fragment of Durendal, the sword of Roland.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a place like that, a living museum. The closest I've come to that was in Germany, when I lived in Augsburg, which was founded by the Romans in 15 B.C., and of course, in Berlin (actually West Berlin at the time), which was founded in 1237 but almost completely destroyed at the end of World War II. Augsburg had a lot of history, and was an important city during the Middle Ages, although it had become less influential in more recent centuries. Augsburg's old town, with its cobblestone streets, felt old, but the area of town where I lived had modern roads and the buildings were of more recent construction as well.
