Provence
Today, France’s second city is fraught with contradictions as it struggles to maintain its many identities: largest commercial port; industrial centre; immigrant centre; holiday destination; pleasure-boat port; traditional fishing harbour; world architectural site. Traffic and pollution have taken their toll, but after years of decline, the city’s fortunes picked up with the development of the TGV, the high-speed train which makes it possible to reach Marseilles from downtown Paris in three hours. Everyone’s favourite beach at Cassis is half an hour by train from the city (Frédéric Mistral said: if you’ve seen Paris but not Cassis, you’ve seen nothing), so it really is possible to leave work at five p.m. on Friday and be at a café on one of the finest beaches on the Mediterranean before dark during the summer. At the vieux port fishermen still dry their nets on the quays and you can buy from the morning’s catch out of crates of squid, mullet, and anything fishy to go in soup. Those most interested in the human face of history will want to spend time in the Panier quarter, next to the port, where modest buildings represent ‘the Old Marseilles’ of living memory, in which countless waves of immigrants from all over Europe and north Africa sought refuge and a new life for hundreds of years. Art lovers will find themselves in a golden triangle here, with the Picasso museum in the Château Grimaldi at Antibes, the Musée Matisse in Nice and, of course, the Atelier Cézanne at Aix, although for some the height of the trip can only be the jardin d’été and the Café van Gogh in Arles.
Mauroux, Le Lot, June 2008
(first published in Provence Sketchbook, Editions Didier Millet, 2008)