Visiting Amboise Chateau (Loire Valley, France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Amboise Château (Loire Valley, France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The British always reserve ahead for tour buses of at least 30 to go around visiting châteaux along the Loire River in summer.  If you do not have a reservation in July for a tour bus, it is almost impossible to buy tickets for a small group. 

With no tour buses available, Laurent and my American family drove to Amboise in stick-shift cars as a bachelor-bachelorette party.  It was stop-and-go all the way there, but we finally made it.

Amboise dominates a rock outcropping on the right bank of the Loire.  It has high walls that tower over the Loire River; during one of many religious wars, Protestants hung from the walls of Amboise as trophies.

The round towers are large enough for horses to trot up four abreast to the garden esplanade.  A king could ride in his covered carriage up to safety from trouble in town below easily this way.

We took a tour in French that our bilingual wedding attendees had to translate for the rest of us.  Defenders of Amboise have been fighting off intruders at this spot since the 11^th century during the 100 Years’ War with England.

Charles VIII defended the Loire Valley less and invaded Italy more during the Italian Wars in the 15^th century.

Charles VIII discovered the luxurious Italian lifestyle and brought back Italian furniture for his castles as well as Italian architects, sculptors, and gardeners.

The flame-styled Gothic windows line up in one wing against the rectangular Renaissance windows in another.

“That would be a great photograph to show the difference between those two styles,” I said in my nascent reviewer’s eyes.

Leonardo da Vinci is buried at Amboise.  The Valois King Francis the First brought him to Amboise to paint, put on parties, and build war machines as da Vinci did for Ludovico Sforza of Milan. 

At one time, there was a restaurant in a half-timbered home in Old Town Tours called the Leonardo da Vinci that had models of his war machines dangling from the ceiling.  The restaurant was Italian with the Milanese specialty of risotto on the menu.

Leonardo da Vinci’s home, the Clos Lucé, is located at the foot of Amboise with its own museum containing the artist’s notebooks that he wrote in reverse script that he could read in a mirror.  (Industrial espionage prevention tactic in the Renaissance?)

I studied art history in high school and at the University of Chicago, which enabled me to identify and compare styles without textbooks at Amboise. 

I thanked all my dignified professors at the University of Chicago, whom I thought were a little stodgy in their suits, ties, and pocket hankies for their hideously grueling essay exams, so I could be my own tour guide in France, if needed.

Essay questions like “Discuss the Development of Plurifacial Sculpture in Renaissance Italy using at least 10 Sculptures as Examples with Complete Identification” and “Compare and Contrast 15^th Century Italian Renaissance Painting in Florence, Sienna, Venice, and Rome using at least 5 Works from each City” explain why I spent hours memorizing art works in the art library and described all my professors as sort of “evil in a good way” over pizza.  They wanted to keep little undergraduates like me in their graduate courses occupied in wholesome pursuits.

Those art history tests had three essay questions and usually 30 identification questions, which required identification slides, design and composition analysis, and significance of the work of art in its social and historical context.  You had to do this in about three or four paragraphs.

Fast writing and thinking were a by-product of this testing.

I was having fun at my wedding, and it had not even started yet.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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