Essential Europe Travel

Versailles & Giverny with lunch Moulin de Fourges

After picking you up at the doorstep of your downtown hotel in Paris, our guide will take you for a wonderful day outside of Paris. During this day you will be driven to Versailles Palace, residence of the Sun King, Louis XIV. There, you will discover the famous "A la Francaise" gardens, as well as the Grand Trianon and The Petit Trianon with Marie Antoinette's Hamlet. Unguided visit for about an hour of the great apartments, the Hall of Mirrors, and the Queen's appartments.

This day will also lead you to the edge of Normandy, where you will visit Claude Monet's home, the "Father of Impressionism". Discover the famous gardens created by the impressionist painter, and the well known Japanese bridge in the midst of its flowered paths and wather-lily ponds.

"Claude Monet's property at Giverny, left by his son to the Académie des Beaux-arts in 1966, has, after completion of large scale restoration work, become the Claude Monet Foundation, inaugurated in 1980. The house, with its pink crushed brick façade, where the leader of the Impressionist School lived from 1883 to 1926, once again has its colourful décor and intimate charin of former times. The precious collection of Japanese engravings is displayed in several rooms, hung in the marmer chosen by the master of Giverny himself.

The huge Nymphéas studio, a stone's throw from the house, has also been restored. It contains the Foundation's Shop. The gardens have been replanted as they once were and offer for the admiration of visitors the "painting from nature" which Claude Monet's contemporaries considered one of his masterpieces. The rectangular Clos Normand, with archways of climbing plants entwined around brilliantly coloured shrubs, lies before the house and studios, offering from Spring to Autumn the palette of varying colours to the painter-gardner who was "ecstatic about flowers". Lastly, the Water Garden, formed by a tributary of the Epte, lies further away, shaded by weeping willows. With its famous Japanese Bridge, its wistarias, azaleas and its pond, it has once more become that casket of sky and water which inspired the pictorial universe of the water lilies."