Nantes

The writer Stendhal remarked of 19th-century Nantes, "I hadn't taken twenty steps before I recognized a great city." Since then, the river that flowed around the upper-crust Ile Feydeau neighborhood has been filled in and replaced with a rushing torrent of traffic on the major highways that now cut through the heart of town. Still, Nantes is more than the sum of its traffic jams, and even the bureaucratic severance of the city from Brittany—it's now the capital of the Pays de la Loire region—has not robbed it of its historic Breton character. Stay a spell to discover its many charms.