14 Best Sights in Normandy, France

Perhaps the most impressive Modernist church in France, the Église St-Joseph was designed by Auguste Perret in the 1950s. The 350-foot tower powers into the sky like a fat rocket, and the interior is just as thrilling. No frills here: the 270-foot octagonal lantern soars above the crossing, filled almost to the top with abstract stained glass that hurls colored light over the bare concrete walls.

The ancient cod-fishing port of Fécamp was once a major pilgrimage site, and this magnificent abbey church bears witness to its religious past. Founded by the duke of Normandy in the 11th century, the Benedictine abbey became the home of the monastic order of the Précieux Sang de la Trinité (Precious Blood of the Trinity—referring to Christ's blood, which supposedly arrived here in the 7th century in a reliquary from the Holy Land).

A late-Gothic masterpiece, this church sits across Rue de la République behind the cathedral and bears testimony to the wild excesses of Flamboyant architecture. Take time to examine the central and left-hand portals of the main facade, covered with little bronze lion heads and pagan engravings. Inside, note the 16th-century organ, with its Renaissance wood carving, and the fine marble columns. Recent renovations revealed the beauty of the church's stone filigree.

Across the square, beneath a 240-foot spire, the late-Gothic church of St-Pierre is a riot of ornamental stonework.

This popular attraction tells the story of Joan of Arc in well-translated videos. As visitors tour the Archbishop's Palace, they follow in Joan's footsteps—she was condemned to death here in 1431 and pardoned posthumously in 1456 following a trial on the second floor.

A superb array of local pottery and European porcelain can be admired at this museum, housed in an elegant mansion near the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Gallo-Roman glassware and mosaics, medieval tapestries and enamels, and Moorish ceramics vie for attention inside this extensive antiquities museum. Occupying a former 17th-century monastery, it also has a display devoted to natural history, which includes some skeletons dating to prehistoric times.

One of Rouen's cultural mainstays, this museum is famed for its stellar collection of paintings and sculptures from the 16th to the 20th century, including works by native son Géricault as well as by David, Rubens, Caravaggio, Velázquez, Poussin, Delacroix, Degas, and Modigliani. Most popular of all, however, is the impressive Impressionist gallery, with Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, plus the Postimpressionist School of Rouen headed by Albert Lebourg and Gustave Loiseau.

Not far from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, this museum claims to have the world's finest collection of wrought iron, with exhibits spanning the 4th through 19th centuries. The displays, imaginatively housed in a converted medieval church, include the professional instruments of surgeons, barbers, carpenters, clockmakers, and gardeners.

The most spectacular scenery along the coast is at the Pointe du Hoc, 13 km (8 miles) west of St-Laurent. Wildly undulating grassland leads past ruined blockhouses to a cliff-top observatory and a German machine-gun post whose intimidating mass of reinforced concrete merits chilly exploration. Despite Spielberg's cinematic genius, it remains hard to imagine just how Colonel Rudder and his 225 Rangers—only 90 survived—managed to scale the jagged cliffs with rope ladders and capture the German defenses in one of the most heroic and dramatic episodes of the war. A granite memorial pillar now stands on top of a concrete bunker, but the site otherwise remains as the Rangers left it—look down through the barbed wire at the jutting cliffs the troops ascended and see the huge craters left by exploded shells. The American Battle Monuments Commission, which maintains the site, provides a self-guided tour that passes ammunition bunkers, a hospital bunker, antiaircraft positions, and other sites.

Soak up the seafaring atmosphere by strolling around the old harbor and paying a visit to the ravishing wooden church of Ste-Catherine, which dominates a tumbling square. The sanctuary and ramshackle belfry across the way—note the many touches of marine engineering in their architecture—were built by townspeople to show their gratitude for the departure of the English at the end of the Hundred Years' War, in 1453.

Head east on D67 from Ste-Mère to Utah Beach, which, being sheltered from the Atlantic winds by the Cotentin Peninsula and surveyed by lowly sand dunes rather than rocky cliffs, proved easier to attack than Omaha. Allied troops stormed the beach at dawn, and just a few hours later had managed to conquer the German defenses, heading inland to join up with the airborne troops.