Figeac

Jean-Francois Champollion was born in Figeac in 1790 and announced in 1822 that he had worked out how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, using the Rosetta Stone's parallel Greek text as the key. The town's museum of writing occupies his birthplace and covers scripts worldwide rather than Egypt alone. Behind it, the Place des Ecritures is paved with a black granite copy of the Rosetta Stone at about fourteen times size, laid by the American artist Joseph Kosuth in 1991, so visitors walk across the text. The medieval town around kept its merchant houses with open-sided top floors called soleilhos, used for drying goods.

What you actually see

• The giant Rosetta Stone - a granite floor copy laid across a courtyard.
• The Champollion museum - writing systems from around the world.
• The soleilhos - open top-floor galleries on medieval merchant houses.
• The old town - stone lanes and a covered market square.

When to go

April to October; the museum closes Mondays out of season. The Saturday market fills the centre. Summer is hot but the town is less crowded than the Lot villages.

Honest expectations

The museum is about writing broadly, not an Egyptology collection, which surprises some. The Rosetta pavement is a modern artwork, not an artefact. The town is quiet outside market days.

Nearby

Saint-Cirq-Lapopie lies southwest; Conques is northeast.