Thionville

Thionville began as an emperor's address. As Theodonis villa it was one of Charlemagne's favoured royal residences: the emperor held general assemblies here, kept Christmas and Easter at the palace, and issued from it the Capitulary of Thionville in 805 — imperial legislation datelined on the banks of the Moselle. The Carolingian villa grew into a fortress town of the counts of Luxembourg, and the fortifications accumulated for centuries: the squat Tour aux Puces, now the town museum, survives from the medieval circuit, and after Louis XIV acquired the town, Vauban and his successors modernised the defences whose traces still frame the riverfront.

The modern age gave Thionville a second empire — iron. The valleys around it became the heart of Lorraine's steel country, the "fiery valley" whose blast furnaces lit the sky for a century and drew workers from across Europe; their descendants give the town its layered, border-crossing character, reinforced today by the thousands who commute daily to Luxembourg, twenty minutes north. The steelworks have largely fallen silent, and Thionville has turned to the river: the Moselle quays, the beffroi's carillon and the pedestrian old town make an amiable centre.

Its cultural life has a distinctive flagship — the town hosts a national drama centre with a cross-border vocation, staging work for audiences on both sides of the frontier, which is the most Thionville idea imaginable: an emperor's villa, a steel town, now a stage shared between three countries.