Less than 90 minutes from Paris stands a town that looks like time forgot it - and deliberately so. Provins is a medieval walled town, on the UNESCO list for over twenty years now, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was France's third-largest city and one of Europe's main trading centers. Today most travelers don't even know it exists, and that's precisely its beauty.

The secret of its preservation is ironic: the industrial revolution simply passed it by. While other towns demolished and rebuilt, Provins stayed frozen in its Middle Ages. Under the Counts of Champagne, six great fairs a year were held here, each lasting several weeks, bringing not just goods but people, ideas and culture from all of western Europe. The town even minted its own coin - the provinois - accepted in markets across the continent.

What to see? The Caesar Tower, an octagonal Romanesque keep - the only one of its kind in France. About 1.2 kilometers of walls with 22 towers, built between 1226 and 1314, with the fortified Saint-Jean gate. Beneath the old town stretch underground galleries carved into limestone, once used to store precious goods during the fairs - so mysterious that Umberto Eco mentions them in one of his novels.

For those who come for colors and scents, there's the Rosarium - a garden of three and a half hectares with over 450 rose varieties, among them, it's said, roses brought back from the Crusades. And in June the town comes alive with "Les Médiévales," one of the biggest medieval festivals in Europe, when the streets fill with knights, craftsmen and horsemen as if the set had been waiting there for centuries.

Provins isn't a place you'll find on the front page of the travel guides, and that's exactly why it's worth it. At a time when every famous town is crammed with buses and queues, there's something almost luxurious about walking along walls eight centuries old, with almost no one around.