The royal estate of Château-Gaillard, commissioned by Charles VIII upon his return from the First Italian War, is located in Amboise in the Loire Valley. It includes, notably, a royal residence that is one of the Loire Valley châteaux and extends at the base of the southern slope of the Châteliers promontory, near the Clos-Lucé.
Château-Gaillard is a royal estate built for Charles VIII upon his return from the First Italian War in 1496. Admiring the Poggio Reale villa of Ferdinand the Catholic in Naples, he wished to have a comparable residence near his château in Amboise.
The Château-Gaillard estate served as a 'laboratory' for the French Renaissance: it was the first acclimatization garden in France, featuring the creation of the first royal orangery in France, the first Renaissance garden in France designed by Dom Pacello da Mercogliano, which included the first axial landscape perspective and the first 'French formal garden' parterres. It was also the first French adaptation of Italian Renaissance architecture, inspired by the Medici villas in Florence.
The royal estate of Château-Gaillard was listed as a historical monument in 1963 for its chapel and gardens located in front of the château. After five years of restoration, the estate was opened to the public in 2014.
The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.