Castle!

In Nice, everything is translated from French into English and Italian for the convenience of the foreign tourists everywhere. It makes sense to have things in Italian considering how close Nice is to the Italian border, but I still thought that it was cool that in Carcassonne, which is in Southwest France, everything is translated from French into English and Spanish.

Anyways, I spent the day exploring the town. The ramparts are accessible in a lot of areas, and large areas of the castle are open complete with audio guide which was really nice. Carcassonne has a long and complicated history of occupation that I only followed for as long as the audio guide was speaking into my ear. I do remember that at one time, Carcassonne was a border town between France and Spain, and therefore was incredibly important for front line defense. When some treaty or other was signed, the border moved further south and Carcassonne became relatively unimportant. The castle was restored in the 19th century by a famous architect named Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. He made all these extrapolations and hypotheses about what the castle would have looked like during it's various occupations over the centuries. A reddish line in the wall here represents the time when the Romans inhabited the area and levelled the wall, a line of holes along the stone there were the place for the beams to be inserted as support for the wooden room to be constructed on the second floor. Nowadays, computer programs can create 3D models of the town by electronically scanning the area. This allows archeologists to create more solid hypotheses about what the town used to be like. Even against this technology, the work of the architect 200 years ago that he did all by himself without fancy technology is, for the most part, just as accurate. Bad Ass