Musée lapidaire at Narbonne

The door of the museum – which is housed in a former church – opens into a box office where you buy your tickets. A second door opens into a black void, shutting automatically behind you. Only the cinema-style cat’s-eyes ranged along the floor indicate the path to be taken. Even so, you feel disorientated. Suddenly the walls above your head are illuminated, and sound crashes in from all directions. A high-tech son-et-lumière thunderstorm washes down the nave of the church swirling around the choir, clawing at the side chapels.

When your eyes have adjusted to the sudden night, and your adrenalin-spiked mind has recovered a semblance of rationality, you begin to make out the long corridor of carved stone in which you are standing. This is a museum. In a church. And yet your heart is still racing. The images projected onto the walls are not scenes from the film ‘Gladiator’, but chariots chiselled in stone. The Roman inscriptions are from silent tombstones - but here they are punctuated by drums. They slither across the walls, or up them, but never down. Down is out.

Then the walls are covered in paint. Frescos from this, the one-time capital of southern Gaul, but also, recognisably, from Pompeii. Mosaics follow, filling the arcading. A flute trills and an organ rumbles as a series of medieval tapestries are unrolled over the walls. The church then becomes an immense library, books corrugating the stonework. In an instant, Renaissance stained-glass gives sight back to the blind windows. By now your vision has adjusted, and a second set of cat’s-eyes has led you to a seat, but it is difficult to sit down because the spectacle is all around, twisting your neck into unaccustomed arrangements.

Finally, rays of light climb up the pillars as dawn creeps in. You sit there, still disorientated, but now emotionally exhausted as well. In front of you, behind you, and to the sides, are stub walls, the dislocated Rubik’s cube of the Roman empire. The architectural fragments found in Narbonne over the centuries have been put together with all the logic of a stone mason wanting to fill the available space as economically as possible. There is no archaeo-logic here. There is no explanation either. Not a single printed word anywhere in this church-museum. Even the guide book retrieved from the box-office only devotes four of its 24 pages to the stones, and then it isn’t easy to identify the objects in question.

But this is not the point. This museum is all about ambiance. And it does it very well. It is worth going for the show alone, which is a good thing as you won’t learn anything about the stones.