Provence
However, nobody who has ever admired a Van Gogh leaves out Arles and the Camargue, which sit at the mouth of the wild frothing Rhône. With an area of over 930 km² (360 sq. miles), the Camargue is western Europe’s largest river delta (technically an island, as it is surrounded by water). It is a vast plain comprising large brine lagoons or étangs, cut off from the sea by sandbars and encircled by reed-covered marches which are in turn surrounded by a large cultivated area. Pinioned between the two great arms of the Rhône, Arles belongs to an immense alluvial plain, a still-wild world under a sky even more turbulent in winter than during the summer mistrals; it is all about lakes and ponds, meadows, reed beds, rice fields, pink flamingoes, egrets, and plenty of mosquitoes. The celebrity, down here, though, is the black bull of the Camargue, who exacts a religious respect from the locals.
Paris was a tribal village when Phoenician sailors established Massalia on the southern coast of France during the 6th century B.C. Lawrence Durrell spent the last 20 years of his life at Sommières, not far from Avignon, where he was the first of modern English writers to give full justice to ancient Provençal history in Caesar’s Vast Ghost.