After arriving at the busy modern train station, my girlfriend, Alex, and I crossed over the narrow Vilaine River into Rennes’ old city, and were greeted by the surprisingly grandiose Place de la Mairie. To one side of the spacious plaza, the opulent 19th-century opera house is designed to look as if its colossal rotunda could slide across the square and fit like a puzzle piece into the concave center of the Baroque city hall. But Rennes is a much less grandiose city than this flamboyant architectural welcoming would suggest. Its real draw lies just north of here, where much of the once-walled medieval city is intact, its streets lined with striking maisons à colombage — “half-timbered” homes dating back to the 15th century, fronted by giant wooden lattices made from the region’s once plentiful forests.

Though, like Paris, Rennes has a bike-sharing system, as well as a modest one-line metro, its greatest pleasure lies in getting lost on foot in the old city. We spent one afternoon wandering secluded streets like Rue des Portes Mordelaises, which was hidden behind an arched doorway in a remaining slice of the stone ramparts that once protected the city, and into plazas humbler than Place de la Mairie, like Place du Champ Jacquet, which is lined by a fully intact row of those towering timber-framed houses. In many places the sides of the historic buildings are covered in patriotic murals depicting Brittany’s black-and-white coat of arms, and street signs are written in both French and Breton. (This is mostly as a proud nod to this heritage; few people still speak the ancient language.)

Not that Rennes is all about quaint pathways and plazas. It is also home to two large universities and approximately 60,000 students, and at night the old city comes alive with a vibrant party scene. Most of the bars are clustered around Rue St.-Michel, known to locals as “la rue de la soif” — the street of thirst. After dark on any given weekend, which, following the university schedule, begins on Thursday, you can find hordes of students chatting on the sidewalk and drinking beers long after the 1 a.m. closing time.

A magnet for musicians and artists, Rennes first burst onto the cultural map in the 1980s when a musical scene sprang up around some local new-wave bands like Marquis de Sade, who in 1979 headlined the first Transmusicales festival. The then small gathering of local groups has since grown to include everything from French hip-hop to British electronica and American indie rock.

“When I heard the buzz here, I just had to come, because something was happening,” said Philippe Maujard, a musician who got his start in Rennes in the ’80s with the rock band Ubik, and who earlier this year founded the record label Wild Wild Rennes. “You went in a bar and everyone you met wanted to be a singer, a musician or a writer.”