Photo : Benjamin Smith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Porte Saint-André à Autun
The Porte Saint-André is part of the town's Roman ramparts. It stands at the eastern exit of the town, on the old Decumanus Maximus and the road to Besançon and Dijon. In its lower part, the gate has two central arches for vehicles, framed by two pedestrian passages projecting 1.20 m. The whole is topped by a gallery of ten arcades flanked by fluted pilasters and crowned by an entablature with a cornice. The gate was protected by two semicircular towers: the right-hand one has been transformed and now houses Autun's Protestant church; only a fragment of wall remains of the left-hand one. The gallery is a late-Antique rebuilding. The ground-floor vaults have been restored; the gallery vaults were "invented" by Viollet-le-Duc.
