So now I know the Somme isn't just battlefields and poignant memories.
It's also the peaceful river embracing Amiens, where I stand admiring rowers racing towards medieval houses lining ancient canals.
A quayside market hawks fantastic vegetables grown a stones throw away, fruits de mer from the nearby Baie de Somme, plus myriad ducky delights.
The sunlit towpath is busy with strollers, joggers and rowing coaches yelling at their crews.
In its Roman heyday, Amiens was the Empire's Gallic backstop in the struggle against the restive Brits, a pre-eminence which gave it thrice the population of petit Paris an hour to the south. Later it grew rich on textiles, with a sideline in woad exports to those still restive Brits.
But today, Picardy's capital is content to relax aimed its waterway and grand architecture whose star is Europe's largest Gothic cathedral.
I crane to take in its facade, bedecked with thousands of statues, which my guide assures me would take him four hours to explain in depth. I caress stony depictions of "sins and virtues" before stepping into a nave twice the size of Notre Dame in Paris.
But despite the cathedral's magnificence, for me Amiens' most striking USP is its "floating gardens", or hortillonnages, carved from marshland in medieval times, these peaty allotment-covered islands (which supply the quayside markets) are delineated by intersecting waterways like a liquid Manhattan. Between April and October visitors can hire a boat, €12 for 2 hours (with an outboard motor if you don't want to paddle) to nose through this whimsical landscape.
Its a fantasy world wholly appropriate to a town where the brilliant fantasist Jules Verne served as a councilor for 17 years. Verne fled the hubbub of Paris and settled with a local gal in Amiens (his grave lies in the charmingly overgrow Madeleine Cemetery), and his tall graceful house on rue Charles Dubois, open to the public, offers insights into an imagination that spanned this world (and others) in the 34 novels he wrote here.
I bet he got inspiration at the Museum of Picardie. I stop to gawp at world-class pharaonic and Roman objets. Renaissance treasures and florid art housed in a Napoleon III edifice not far from the ornate Cirque Jules Verne that the busy town councillor arranged to be built for the grand entertainments he loved. If circus (and cabaret) aren't your thing, get a kick with a wager on idiosyncratic Gallic trotting horse races at the Hippodrome. The Romans would have loved the chariots.
In between museums and waterside pottering, I browse on the rue du Hocquet with a foray over the river to the antique warehouse on rue de la Dodane in the medieval quarter Saint-Leu. I grab gourmet gifts - ask about poppy-infused cheese - at the food market by the 12th-century Belfry. Lovers of brocante should note the giant flea markets (les réderies in the Picard dialect) held late April and October.
After dinner, I grab a nightcap at the bustling Le Café (17 rue Flatters), then amble hotel-ward through sepia-lit backstreets. Rounding a corner, I'm transfixed by a kaleidoscope of colour playing on the Perret Tower - Amiens' riff on an old-school New York skyscraper.
Inspired perhaps by Verne's showman style, the council's decision to light the tower in shifting colours has transformed a once loved landmark into a local favourite. Sometimes all you need to do is shine the right light on a place.
by Norman Miller: April 2013
