I remember being in south-west France, the Occitaine of old, thirty years ago. Then I was surprised by the abundance of Romanesque architectrue, the way the Gothic architecture in Albi looked more like a fortress than like a church, and I was also surprised by the lack of anything else.
But of course that can all be explained from history. The pre-Gothic era was the high-time of an independent and proud southern state of Occitaine, Gothic was the architectural style of the northern french conquerors, Albi was the place where southern resistance and a southern flavor of Christianity were cruelly suppressed.
After that time centralization set in, the French kings sucked out the land and all money went to Paris. The culture of the Troubadour courts died and the following hundreds of years saw little architectural innovation down in the stubborn old south.
Here in Austria our high-time was in the era from Baroque up to the end of the Empire. It shows. You hardly find churches without baroque altars and sculptures, and so it is here in Villach.
The Song of the Day is “Devotion” by Jessie Ware. Hear it on YouTube.