During those austere postwar decades before travel overseas became almost routine for us in Britain, folk memories of a more exotic, prettier, friendlier, sunnier and above all warmer Elsewhere lurked in the collective subconscious, and drove us slowly crazy. When they told us we could afford summer trips to that Elsewhere called France, so long as we camped, we turned the annual journey south into a national grand prix, which began on the first weekend of the school holidays and bestowed bragging rights on the first reckless driver to reach the Mediterranean. Amazing speeds were recorded; the BBC interviewed a man who had driven from Manchester to Cannes with his family and his ?French frame tent? in less than three days. In other words, we Brits were in the grip of one of our fads.

Mum and Dad were more cautious. We drove the Morris Minor on to a train at Boulogne and drove it off again at Aix-en-Provence, then continued in the dark for a few hours until we reached the camping site. Next morning we woke up in the middle of a Cezanne landscape. We all spent the day stunned, especially me. Surely this could not be real? The earth was not damp enough, the sky stayed blue for unnaturally long periods of time, the ice cream tasted terrific and it was hot. Very hot.
As a family, we quickly discovered that different rules applied in Elsewhere. Mum drank too much red wine and told dirty jokes. Dad confessed to me how sexy he found Provencal women. I discovered, decades later, that his taste in this respect exactly replicated Racine?s, who described the local maidens thus to his chum La Fontaine: color verus, corpus solidum et succi plenum: ?natural color, firm bodies and full of sap?. We also have Racine-en-Provence to thank for an unadorned view of working class France before the 35-hour working week: ?You will see a huge number of harvesters roasted by the sun who work like demons; and, when they are totally out of breath, they throw themselves on the ground in direct sunlight, sleep for a brief moment, then immediately get up again.? Racine also offers the first recorded complaint about the cicada noise level. But it was Rousseau who really started tourism in Provence; ironically, his most influential dispatch was not about noble nature, but that most extraordinary feat of Roman technology called the Pont du Gard, a magnificent aqueduct near Avignon, which is now a world heritage site and sees more than a million visitors each year.
So, it was all there on that first day: a canvas of infinite subtlety, complexity and history, which yet gave the appearance of simplicity. Like Racine we, too, noticed the cicadas and their legendary tendency to stop rubbing their legs together during the national lunch break, from twelve to two every afternoon. A walk to the mini-market at the camping site was an adventure in a new universe of odours: garlic, olive oil, wine, French fries. The olfactory and aesthetic references expanded greatly when we took a drive to the nearest village: fennel, dry pine, wild flowers of the undergrowth on the approach; in the cool of a village shop with massive stone walls, a stone bowl of patchouli strategically placed; houses bordered with cypress and pink laurel; a tiny restaurant with gay table cloths on which the olive oil, the bread basket, tomato, garlic and a stone jar of fresh water had already been placed. When we moved to a camping site near the sea, we found a land which in most respects had not changed since Van Gogh described it to Theo: it?s too beautiful?sunsets of pale orange turn the land blue?yellow suns hover over Provencal orchards with a monstrous gaiety?the sea is the color of mackerel, which is to say changeable, one never knows if it is green or violet, one never knows if it is blue, because the light changes in seconds and can take on a grey or rose tint. I still remember the pine forest next to the camp, the knotted trunks of the olives bowed in the direction of the mistral and the great, Cezannesque blocks of white stone that poked through the earth.
It was a different age. The entente cordiale between our two countries was earthier then. Our women never stopped observing that French women didn’t shave under their arms, and French women wondered why our girls didn?t know how to wiggle their behinds properly. Men on both sides spent hours, sometimes days, agreeing vehemently on what bastards the Nazis were. Naturally, I fell in love with a French au pair as soon as we got back to London. She came from a small town near Nice and returned there for the summer. In the school library I looked up ?Provence? and read all I could find.

It did not surprise me to discover that Provence was a country long before France existed as a political entity. Its name derives from Latin: the Romans thought of it as a valuable province of Rome, partly thanks to the natural harbour at Marseilles, which was famous throughout the ancient world under the name of Massalia; Plato, who was an olive-oil trader in his day job, may have bought and sold on the seafront there. Therefore, the Mediterranean defines the southern border, whence arrives the sirocco with its yellow dust. To the north, where the mistral starts its howling, Provence is said to begin after the Donz�re Gorge on the Rhone about 60 miles north of Avignon, when the whole sky opens up to the southern light. The eastern border is none other than the foothills of the Alps; in the west the Rhone provides a natural frontier.
The Provence of the Romans, though, was bigger and included much land west of the Rhone; in the Middle Ages practically the whole of this part of the Mediterranean considered itself Provencal, from Catalonia to Liguria. Given such an independent history, it is not surprising that Provence in its present form was not created until after the Revolution; it has consisted ever since of the five departments: Vaucluse, Bouches-du-Rhone, Basses-Alpes (now renamed Alpes-de Haute-Provence), Var, Alpes-Maritimes. But it?s a case of five departments with ten landscapes, for Provence is above all a land of abrupt contrasts: the rocky soil of Crau; the lakes of the Camargue; the thin soil of the Luberon; the snowy foothills of the Alps; the marshlands of the Rhone and the Durance; the mimosas, palms and orange trees of the Cote d’Azur; the rocky inlets of Cassis; the humid valley of Gapeau; the cold of the Verdon gorges; the clement temperature of Hy�res.

It is no accident, therefore, that Fabrice Moireau?s sketches reveal ancient and medieval influences, for example in the arc de triomphe romain d?Orange and in the Theatre Antique with its magnificent mur de sc�ne, which Louis XIV called ?the most beautiful wall in my kingdom?; and the church of Saint-Trinit which, perched 850 metres up on the plateau of Albion, is said to represent the very height of the stonemason?s skill. However, Moireau also knows to point up the hearty abundance of the land itself, for it was not for its history that Provence was first explored by members of Louis XIV?s court. From the start Provence as vacation destination was all about nature ? or at least as much of it as the pampered literati could take: Madame de Sovigne, who came to live in Grignan, famously described hay-making as “frolicking in a meadow”.
All this fascinating information caused a slow volcanic build-up during one restless London spring; I knew I was going hitch-hiking as soon as the holidays began, whether mum and dad approved or not.

It was the mid-sixties by now. Something big was about to happen; we all felt it in our bones. A year later the cultural tsunami of ?68 blew us away, with riots, wars and LSD. France that year was electric with talk of revolt; the whole nation remembered a discarded identity: nobody does revolution like the French do revolution. There was a Che Guevara with an Evita Peron in every cafe in Aix. In Avignon the old city walls were a perfect backdrop for beautiful young orators with black beards and shining eyes. I understood on that trip that revolutions were created so the various French classes could talk to each other again, just like under Danton and Robespierre. As in 1789, the moment was an orgasm of language, as if someone had finally got the cork out of the national fizz bottle and now everyone wanted some. Precise, Latin, cutting, slicing, charming, exploding ? passionate speech was gratuit and partout; everyone had someone to talk to, or at least to listen to.

Then as now, Aix-en-Provence was as good a place as any to begin exploring. It is by far the most bourgeois Provencal town; some say the old Roman part has become the 21st arrondissement of Paris. Beautiful young people with Harley Davidsons and torn denims can be found sharing themselves with the world here on the cours Mirabeau most weekends and throughout the long hot summer, while young waiters with pale complexions and black hair falling over their eyes lay out delicacies of high cuisine and the inevitable pastis with ice and water. Cezanne is so central to the identity that the mountain of Sainte-Victoire, which he painted so many hundreds of times, is referred to familiarly as “la Sainte”.

From Aix it is usual to follow the flow southeast to the Mediterranean and the beaches of Cassis, Cannes and Nice; but in the race for the sea we risk missing the very essence of the land. When I visit these days, I prefer to go north, to Avignon, where I once worked picking grapes as a student: I remember dawns heavy with mist; rainbows in spiders? nests; more free wine than anyone could drink. Only four of the original 22 arches are left of the famous bridge whose official name is Saint-B�n�zet. Perhaps more truly emblematic of the walled town is the famous festival which takes place here every year. Its most celebrated events invariably happen in the Cour d?Honneur du Palais des Papes: no guidebook will let you forget that Avignon was the papal seat and the world centre of Christianity for a hundred years, from 1305 to 1403. And then there is the mountain.
It is often called the Giant of Provence. The official name is Mont Ventoux. It is 1912 meters high ? Ventoux means windy. It can gust up to 193 mph. Tour de France enthusiasts know all about it, for the race has ascended Ventoux thirteen times since 1951; there is a memorial to the great British rider Tom Simpson who died on the peak from heat exhaustion in 1967.

Associated with the Mont is the dentelles de Montmirail, a curious rock-structure (best viewed from the tiny village of Suzette) which resembles lace, hence the name. But this is a country that merits so much more than mere sightseeing. For here is the centre of the Provencal herb legend where the earth is blue for miles around, thanks to a famous wild shrub: Sault is the biggest lavender market in the world, and all the dry, special, herbs intrinsic to French country cooking are at their best and most sought-after here. And it was here, in the heart of the Dr�me, as the area is also known, that Gilbert Ducros founded his spice business which quickly grew into a national cult, thanks to his telegenic genius.

From Cavaillon you can strike due south from Carpentras or follow the Durance from just below Avignon. If coming from Avignon, literary pilgrims might pay a visit to Chateauneuf de Gadagne, where Frederic Mistral and his friends worked at reviving the Occitan tongue, constantly reminding anyone who would listen that Provence was a country and a linguistic centre all on its own. But for most French people Cavaillon means melons. Everyone here is an expert. The most important factor is the weight: the heavier it is, the sweeter and juicier; if it is to be eaten the same day then the stem must be cracked and ready to fall off.

We are in the heart of the Luberon now, whose southern boundary is the Durance river. This is the very Provence of which the troubadours and Ezra Pound sang: I am homesick after mine own kind / and ordinary people touch me not; and it may be no accident that so many modern-day artists and poets visited, admired and sometimes stayed in this corner. Nicholas de Sta�l loved it; Picasso bought a house here for his lover Dora Maar; Albert Camus bought the Chateau de Lourmarin in 1958 with the prize money from his Nobel prize (his body lies in the local cemetery). Giono spent almost all his life here.

If those names mean little to modern English readers, how about Peter Mayle? His book A Year in Provence details the fun and tribulations of twelve months in the Luberon, and, through a set of tones, signs and symbols understood only by Anglo Saxons, transmits to the cognoscenti the secret knowledge that rural Provence is the new Elsewhere. Mayle also gives an important, if sotto voce, reassurance that you don?t need to speak the language to live there and the French might be okay after all. The result was a huge hike in real-estate prices throughout the region. Paysans, deeply attached to le terroir, turned into property developers overnight when they learned how much les pigeons anglais would pay for a house built on a rocky little triangle of it, so long as the house included a swimming pool. Nevertheless, there remain today many unspoilt picture-perfect villages and hamlets throughout the Luberon; Roussillon probably provides the best starting point with its famous ochre earth contrasting with the deep green of the pines.