Rouen holds France's second-richest Impressionist collection outside Paris, the world's only museum of wrought iron, and the room where Flaubert grew up beside his surgeon father's dissection theatre. Three days of galleries, ceramics, opera and studio culture.
Rouen's flagship gallery, opened 1888, holds the second-largest Impressionist collection in France after the Musée d'Orsay — Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Caillebotte — plus Caravaggio's Flagellation and Géricault. Open 10:00-18:00, closed Tuesdays; permanent collection free.
The only museum in the world dedicated to wrought iron, installed in the deconsecrated 16th-century church of Saint-Laurent. Some 12,000 pieces — locks, keys, shop signs, surgical tools, corsets in steel — hang in the nave. Open 14:00-18:00 in season; free entry.
Housed in the Hôtel d'Hocqueville, a 17th-century mansion, this collection traces Rouen faience from 1540 to the Revolution — including the vast blue-and-white pieces that made the city Europe's ceramic capital. Around 5,000 works across period rooms.
A Rayonnant Gothic abbey church begun 1318, longer than the cathedral and considered by architects its superior for structural purity. The 1890 Cavaillé-Coll organ is among the least-altered in France; the 14th-century glass in the choir is original.
Gustave Flaubert was born here in 1821 in the Hôtel-Dieu, where his father was chief surgeon. The rooms pair the family's furniture and the writer's parrot with 18th-century obstetric mannequins and surgical instruments. Open Tuesday-Saturday afternoons.
The municipal library's patrimonial reading room holds Flaubert's working manuscripts, including drafts of Madame Bovary with his brutal self-corrections. Facsimiles are on open display; originals viewable by appointment with a reader's card.
Normandy's opera house, rebuilt 1962 after wartime destruction of the 1776 theatre, seats around 1,300 and runs opera, ballet and its own orchestra. Guided backstage tours run on selected dates; the box office on Rue du Docteur Rambert sells same-day seats.
A converted riverside warehouse on the left bank, Rouen's contemporary music venue programmes rock, electronic and hip-hop across two halls and hosts rehearsal studios for local bands. Its bar terrace faces the Seine and opens on concert evenings.
Inside the archbishop's palace where the 1431 trial and 1456 rehabilitation were held, this museum uses projections onto the medieval stonework to stage the competing testimonies about Joan. Timed entry, roughly hourly; sessions last 50 minutes.
A restored stream runs down the middle of this former dyers' and tanners' street, now lined with bookshops, print dealers and artisan studios. The half-timbered façades with open drying lofts are the ones Flaubert described in Madame Bovary.
A 17th-century convent holding Gallo-Roman mosaics, the Merovingian treasure of the region and medieval ivories, alongside a natural-history cabinet whose taxidermy hall has barely changed since the 19th century. Around 8,000 objects on show.
A 10-hectare botanical garden laid out in 1832 on the left bank, with glasshouses of orchids and carnivorous plants, a rose collection and the giant Amazon waterlily that flowers in late summer. Free entry; gates close at dusk.