The Morning I Walked Through a Painting in Petite Venise
The train from Strasbourg takes 35 minutes. You leave a city with a Gothic cathedral and a European parliament and arrive in a town that looks like it was designed by a children's book illustrator who'd been drinking Gewurztraminer.
I stepped off the platform at Colmar station on a Thursday in late April. The air smelled like fresh bread and something floral — a sensory contrast to the lavender-scented Mediterranean of — wisteria, maybe, or the geraniums that were already overflowing from window boxes on every building I could see.
The walk from the station to the old town took ten minutes. Somewhere around the second turn, the modern world ended and something else began.
Petite Venise at Dawn
I'd set an alarm for 6AM specifically for this. Petite Venise — Little Venice — is Colmar's most photographed quarter. Half-timbered houses in pink, yellow, blue, and green line the Lauch River. Flower boxes drip from every window. The reflections in the still morning water double everything.
At 6:30AM, I was the only person there. Not almost the only person — the only person. The light was soft and gold, coming in at a low angle that made the timber frames cast long shadows on the plaster. A cat watched me from a windowsill on the second floor of a salmon-colored house. Neither of us moved.
I'd seen photos of Petite Venise hundreds of times. But photos don't capture the third dimension — the way the buildings lean slightly, the texture of the plaster, the sound of the river moving slowly under the bridges. I stood on the Pont Saint-Pierre and looked down the canal and understood why Colmar keeps appearing on "fairy-tale towns" lists. It's not a metaphor. It literally looks like it was drawn.
The Unterlinden
The Unterlinden Museum opens at 9AM. I was there at 9:02AM.
The building is a former Dominican convent with a modern extension by Herzog & de Meuron. The extension is all clean lines and light — a counterpoint to the medieval cloister.
But I'd come for one thing: the Isenheim Altarpiece. Matthias Grunewald, 1512-1516. A multi-panel painting originally created for a hospital chapel treating patients with ergotism (a terrible disease caused by contaminated grain).
The crucifixion panel is devastating. Christ's body is twisted with visible agony, his skin covered in sores that Grunewald painted specifically so patients would see their own suffering reflected. It's not beautiful in the conventional sense. It's powerful in a way that made me stand in front of it for twenty minutes without thinking about anything else.
The resurrection panel — revealed when the altarpiece was opened on feast days — shows Christ emerging from the tomb in a burst of yellow and orange light. After the horror of the crucifixion, the contrast is extraordinary.
I've been to the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado. This painting in this small museum in this small Alsatian town held me longer than anything in any of them.
Flammekueche for Lunch
A winstub on a side street near the Place de l'Ancienne Douane. Dark wood paneling. Checked tablecloths. A menu entirely in French with Alsatian dish names that look German.
Flammekueche gratinee: €12. A thin, crisp flatbread spread with creme fraiche, scattered with onions and lardons, then — the gratinee version — covered in melted Munster cheese. The cheese was pungent and exactly right. The crust crackled. I ordered a glass of Riesling Grand Cru from a Colmar domaine (€6) and felt very far from Paris.
The plat du jour was choucroute garnie — sauerkraut with three kinds of sausage, smoked pork, and potatoes. A neighboring table had ordered it. The plate was the size of a serving dish. The portions in Alsace are Germanic. The sensibility is French. This combination produces very satisfying meals.
The Wine Route by Bike
The next morning, I rented a bike from Colmar Velo (€15) and pedaled south toward Eguisheim. The vineyard paths are flat, well-signed, and scenic — rows of vines stretching up the hillsides, medieval church steeples poking above the village rooftops.
Eguisheim is concentric. The village is built in rings around a central square, with half-timbered houses lining lanes that curve back on themselves. It won "France's favorite village" and I'd normally be skeptical of such awards but Eguisheim earned it.
I stopped at a cave (wine cellar) on the Rue du Rempart. A woman named Marguerite poured four wines — Sylvaner, Riesling, Pinot Gris, and Gewurztraminer — and explained the terroir (granite and limestone) in French that she slowed down for my benefit. The Riesling Grand Cru was bone-dry, mineral, and nothing like the sweet Rieslings I'd avoided in other countries.
I bought two bottles. She wrapped them in tissue paper and said "bonne route" — good road.
The bike ride back to Colmar took 30 minutes through vineyards in afternoon light. A stork flew overhead — the enormous white-and-black bird that nests on Alsatian rooftops every spring. It was carrying something in its beak, probably building material for its nest. The scene was so perfect it felt composed.
The 106 Heads
Maison des Tetes on Rue des Tetes. A 1609 merchant house whose facade is covered in 106 sculpted heads — grotesque, comic, serene, angry. Each one different. I stood on the sidewalk and counted for a while, trying to find a pattern. There isn't one. Just 106 expressions of a sculptor's imagination, frozen in stone for four centuries.
On the gable: a copper statue by Bartholdi. The same Bartholdi who designed the Statue of Liberty. He was born in Colmar. There's a small museum dedicated to him (€6) a few blocks away. The Statue of Liberty's connection to this small Alsatian town is one of those facts that makes you reconsider your assumptions about where important things originate.
Leaving
The TER back to Strasbourg departed at 5PM. I watched Colmar's rooftops recede through the train window — the pointed gables, the storks' nests, the church spires.
Alsace is the part of France that feels most like not-France. The architecture is German. The food is heavy. The wines are white. The language is its own thing. But the result isn't confusion — it's a specificity that nowhere else in Europe replicates.
Colmar isn't a town that tries to be charming. It just is, in the way that a well-built house is just solid. The half-timbered facades, the flower boxes, the canals — they're functional as much as decorative. The flowers attract tourists now, but they attracted bees first.
For France's other great wine tradition, Bordeaux offers grand château culture and Atlantic oysters — a completely different expression of French wine country. And the TGV to Paris takes under 3 hours, making Colmar an easy add-on to any French itinerary.
I've been back twice since. The Isenheim Altarpiece doesn't get smaller.
