Rennes in 4 days

Two iron market halls and stalls spilling into the nearby streets, where oysters are opened to order and eaten standing, glass of muscadet in hand.

Look up: storeys jut out over the street, beams carry carved faces, and Place du Champ-Jacquet has the city's most photographed row of crooked houses.

The 17th-century seat of Breton justice, with gilded coffered ceilings and Gobelins tapestries, faithfully restored after a fire during a fishermen's riot in 1994.

Rue Saint-Michel packs some thirty bars into five minutes' walk, mostly on the ground floors of listed half-timbered buildings, at prices set by student budgets.

Built largely on collections seized during the Revolution, it centres on Georges de La Tour's The Newborn, alongside Rubens, Chardin and Gauguin.

Science rooms, a planetarium and the Brittany museum under one roof, whose section on the Dreyfus affair, retried in Rennes in 1899, stands out.

Formal flowerbeds, woodland and wide lawns, with an artificial waterfall and grotto hidden behind the trees that most visitors walk straight past.

The regional contemporary art collection, some five thousand works shown in rotation inside a black monolith by Odile Decq, opened in 2012.