Europe's hidden treasures

Good evening. It was on a train in France 33 years ago that our writer Dixe Wills first became captivated by the artist Marc Chagall, thanks to a fellow passenger who was poring over a book of his vibrant paintings.
Wills believed he’d have to visit St Petersburg to see the work in the flesh - and promised himself that one day he would. It was only when his partner happened to ask if he’d seen “the little Chagall church” last winter that he realised a trip to Russia would not be necessary. Some striking Chagall originals could be seen in Kent, not far from where they lived.
After crossing squelchy fields to the hamlet of Tudeley, the first glimpse of squat little All Saints church was a disappointment, writes Wills, “but that all changed once we went inside”. It’s the only church in the world where Chagall designed every stained-glass window - all 12 of them. The first was a commissioned tribute to a young local woman who had drowned in a sailing accident in 1963. But when he visited for the window’s installation, Chagall fell in love with the church and declared he would “do them all”.
The luscious colours and magical scenes of people and animals, brought to life by the low winter light, left the writer a little awestruck. “Chagall had clearly left something of himself there. And I hadn’t had to cross the continent to see him after all. He’d come to me.”
In our feature, other writers tell more stories of cultural treasures they had long wanted to visit across Europe - from the world’s most stolen artwork in Ghent, to David Bowie’s Berlin bolthole, or Caravaggio paintings semi-hidden in churches in Rome. While Caravaggio’s work can be seen in many galleries, trying to track down masterpieces that lurk behind creaky wooden church doors turned into a kind of treasure trail for writer Jess Cartner-Morley and her young family. “We located boxes on church walls where you could push in a euro and get the lights turned on for 30 seconds… the walls came to life, in glorious oil paint,” she writes. “A triumph!”