Welcome to Part 2 of my May Roundup! (Happy June! - pinch, punch and all that…) If you read yesterday’s Part 1, you’ll know that this letter is all about my family holiday around three cities in the South of France. We were in each city for four or five nights, and managed to have a day trip out from each one too.
This newsletter certainly gives me a good excuse to share all that I’ve seen and learnt (plenty of research and inspiration for my stories, specifically the gem’s journey one, or just general Roman and prehistoric artefacts), but I think it would be too much to go into all the details, so I hope you enjoy this highlight-reel photo gallery, which I’m going to use as a jumping off board for a travel blog of sorts.
(All photos courtesy of my mother and her camera.)
Nimes
Our full day in the city was perhaps the hottest of the whole trip. The Roman amphitheatre is sadly still used for bullfighting, but is amazingly intact considering it’s two thousand years old, and Nimes has a really nice public space around it, connecting with a park and avenue to the train station with more statues and a fountain.Here we are inside the structure. I wonder if Roman architects imagined how far into the future their structure would still be used, with modern seats, lights and scaffolding. Many world-famous musicians have played in here too, from David Bowie to the Police. Because it was so intact, it almost didn’t feel ancient, walking the ant nest-like ovals and many staircases up and down to different sections.Right by where we were staying there was the old Roman gate into town, the sort I’ve read and written about but even more monumental and you know… still standing. I love the juxtaposition of intact pieces like this within the city. It was the first remains I saw on the holiday the evening we arrived, and knew I was in for something special compared to the few brick walls that make up most Romano-British sites.This tower, the Tour Magne, started out life as a free-standing structure built by the original Iron Age inhabitants with a community by the hill and natural spring by Nimes. The Romans added to it, making it part of their city walls with an arched ramp up to that first floor. You can just see the remains of that on the right.This is the view on the way down from that tower, in the beautiful Jardin de la Fontaine. The park started out life as a Roman temple complex by the original sacred spring, with the fountains expanded much more in the city’s more recent textiles boom, and made into a Versaille-esque park with rock features and sculptures.Within the park, as well as the visible bank of a Roman theatre, there’s the remains of a temple. Researching for my writing and using my imagination, I’ve placed my mind inside many ancient temples, mostly Egyptian, those that still stand today. This felt like what I always imagined that to feel like, a sense of awe at being within something so old, and so powerfully still existing. Tall too.Of course one of Nimes’ major attractions is the Maison Carree, the most intact Roman temple in the world, based on that classical Greek design. It would’ve been the centre of the ancient forum, and now it’s the centre of a modern one, with shops around, and a modern art gallery behind it. That was also pretty surreal, the time-warping experience of walking around it, so tangible and yet something I’d only seen in drawings at all these other sites.One evening walk after some showers we were treated to a rainbow (from the goddess Iris?). Of course the temple has been renovated and sadly any trace of inside is lost due to previous uses through the ages, but wow. Makes authoring a lot more simple now I know what it’s like to walk up those steps and stand beneath those pillars.Our day out from Nimes was to the Pont du Gard, the most impressive part of the long aqueduct structure that brought water to the city. It is so large and impressive, like those big railway bridges but even bigger and with the three tiers you can see there, a more modern track along the deeper arches. The water ran along its channel right on the top.This is another nearby part of the route. This was perhaps my favourite day of the holiday, as, though I liked the cities and all of their history and culture, being out in nature following the line of ruins was the closest I could come to those old holidays ‘out in the sticks’ of south France, just playing in the heat, plants and admiring all the wildlife. I saw three new species of butterfly, and felt as free as them as I could follow the old channel across the hilltop.
Avignon
The day we arrived in Avignon, we settled in, then headed straight to this impressive site. The Palace of the Popes is much larger than what’s pictured here, and the cathedral with its giant cross and golden Mary and the cliff top gardens beyond it just add to to enormity of this religious stronghold from a time when the Rhone divided France from the Papalcy. We went inside on another day (but I think beside a couple of painted rooms where you couldn’t take photos, the outside is much better. Worth a walk around the whole base of the palace.) The cathedral was beautifully painted inside, and the gardens were so serene too.Like Nimes, Avignon had many great art galleries and museums not pictured in this roundup, but I had to share just this snippet of the amazing artefacts. These are tens of thousands of years old sculptures/engravings of horses in the Natural History (Requien) museum.This is the view from the edge of the Jardins des Doms, already about halfway down the hillside following the medieval ramparts - that was one thing about Avignon too, the intact crenelated ramparts surround the historic centre. But this is the view of the world famous Pont d’Avignon, that was once over five times longer and snaked across both branches of the Rhone, linking the kingdoms. You can see the chapel on the bridge dedicated to its originator, and the tower built later on the other side, roughly following the line of the bridge with your eyes.Our day out from Avignon involved crossing the modern bridge and walking through what is known as Villeneuve-les-Avignon, but is really just as old. Again I preferred this day out to the city just because the town’s high street and winding hilly roads harkened back to many towns we’ve visited as a family in the past. This is the site of Fort St. Andre, the king’s response to the Pope’s palace on the other side. It was great to explore the castle and enjoy the gardens of the abbey within its walls.We had a very busy day that day, also exploring the cloisters of the Chartreuse, a Benedictine monastery that’s a tourist attraction but also an education centre, library and playwrights retreat (I might look into it!). This was the still so colourful remnants of a room painted by the same artist who decorated the Pope’s palace interiors, Matteo Giovannetti. In 1355 he was ahead of his time.Before finishing the trip in the previously mentioned tower on the Villeneuve side of the river, we visited a small fine art gallery, with this star piece by Enguerrand Quarton. Something about my portal fantasy admiring self likes paintings with all three layers of Christian reality. While I admire all the gold, orange angels and blue cherubs, it’s the little details in hell that interested me more.
Arles
Last but by no means least was Arles. The day that we got there we managed to fit in a cemetery because why not! In all seriousness though, the Alyscamps was where the rich later Romans got to be buried along the roadside leading out of the city, lasting into Medieval times too. There were lots of coffins, and the road now ends in a church that was very interesting just because it was ruined enough to have a flooded basement and pigeons, but intact enough still to have a roof and big pillars.Arles also had a Roman theatre going for it. Most of the seats were reconstructed and it’s nowhere near its full height behind the stage, but the colourful floor for the chorus is still there, as are a couple of pillars and many fragments from the decoration that would’ve run around a structure just as large as half an amphitheatre. We saw seats all in use on one evening walk, for some school event. I wouldn’t’ve minded if my school used an ancient theatre!This was inside the Musee Antique which I mentioned yesterday. This was the last section, with all of the incredible coffins that somehow survived the ages, with so many detailed scenes from pagan but mostly Christian stories. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. (Probably for the best, though.)There were so many things in the museum that I could share. Statues of deities I hadn’t seen, the marble sculptures that would’ve adorned the theatre, an intact boat salvaged from the Rhone, many more mosaics. I chose this one because I loved the pixel art effect these ancient artists used to represent the water. The whole mosaic is beautiful though, despite its mythological subject matter.This was perhaps a family favourite spot of the holiday. It had everything: a creperie (not pictured), a Roman obelisk (taken from the centre of the circus that once ran beside the river on the edge of the city, where the Musee Antique is now), a more modern French town hall and an ornate church entrance.Within the town hall above is the entrance to the Roman cryptoporticus, the lower, covered market section of the massive forum. All three wings were completely preserved - many important artefacts were found down there. We were walking under modern squares in these ancient tunnels.This is the second to last Roman ruin for you all. I hadn’t appreciated the scale of Roman bathhouses until researching to write about the one in Trier during its heyday, so it was rewarding to visit another one of Constantine’s baths (that man was very clean wherever he went), still with all the linings, tiles and sections of underfloor heating.Arles had two fantastic museums within the city too, one about the history of the region and the other an art museum housing many works of Reattu, an artist I hadn’t heard of before but whose works I could appreciate. There’s a nice smorgasbord of it for you.Okay now we’re onto the last Roman ruin. Arles amphitheatre is slightly less preserved, but I liked all the missing sections of floors as you could look up and appreciate the enormity of the monument. Just impressive that any of it’s still standing, really.As you can see, many more reconstructed sections of seats for this arena, though you can also see a portion of tower build onto the upper ring remains. The site of so much bloodshed was actually a sort of fortified town of its own once upon a time, when its ruins and ant nest-like structure was used as housing.Our day trip from Arles was Marseilles, which was what I was expecting but also more, very busy, but also with views like this (the cathedral by the old port), as well as the view down the steps of the train station looking across the city to its basilica on the hill, and the Mediterranean sea.One primary reason for visiting was the Cosquer cave museum, recreation of the famous cave art site found by Mr Cosquer a diver exploring around the calanques. I’ve written a longer short story set in Marseille and also in the cave. You get to go round in a cart like at the Jorvik centre (or like a haunted funfair ride sort of thing), taking in all the incredible cave art of all the usual animal suspects but also aquatic beasties like seals or the extinct great auk. This is the museum space above, which had a good focus on climate change. There’ll be much more about Cosquer in a future ‘A Long Time Ago…’I also visited the incredible history of Marseilles museum, right at the site of the ancient Greek port and town walls, later used by Romans and into the Middle Ages. Just picture the grass as water, and I was actually walking on the ancient quay. Pretty surreal, and also perfect as my gem journey does stop at Marseilles, one of the last stops actually that I’ve written, as after that it’s the long sea voyage to Portus to Rome. Anyway, the museum had incredible models and went all the way up to present day. Some of the ancient Greek and Roman artefacts (from the oldest city in France!) were amazing, but I also appreciated all the statues and paintings from a destroyed church reunited in a space. There was also a crazy graphic of the size of the city over time, how it slowly grew for hundreds and hundreds of years, stopped for a while and then suddenly exploded with the advent of industry, and exploded again to tens of times its first size since.
Thus ends my captioning. I’ll also mention here that while at Marseille, as well as the incredible experience of moving through that cave and visiting this port from my stories, going to the modern day site of a beach was the one thing that actually made me more emotional. Maybe because it was a site that I’d chosen to write about not because of any historical accuracy or predetermined location. It’s a site with an importance that has grown in my storytelling as I decided a character from that short story should pop up elsewhere. It was the same sort of magic as Force ghosts from Star Wars, to stand there and see my original characters in their positions, recreate the beats in my mind, take in the same views, project my imagination outwards. Bet the people sunning themselves wondered what I was doing there!
There are many more not pictured that I can think of - but if I wrote about them all this would be a long, long post resembling more of a travel book. I did appreciate all the prehistoric statues in the Nimes Natural History museum, little guys all of a similar design I hadn’t seen before. We also tried lots of good food - I could get used to popping down the bakery every morning.
There’s also so much that you can’t capture in photos, like the relaxed feel of Avignon with all the little squares and shiny pedestrian streets (with quite a few comic/board game/collectables shops!). I also enjoyed the un-documentable process of getting to know a city. You can normally grasp a place’s general character in your first day, and each of the three cities had its own unique blend, its own highs and lows. After about three days I manage to get a general layout too (depending on the city’s size).
If by some strange chance you’d like to see some (30) more photos of this trip (taken on my phone), I recently made my instagram public, the plan being that hopefully I can use it for some sort of marketing when the official Insider announcement/preview can drop. Here’s the link. You’ll also find many highlights from my previous travels on there.
It’s family holiday tradition to get the coins from the places we visit, going back to the first trip I can remember at age seven.
And that's the end of this second part of my May roundup. Thank you so much for reading through this highlight reel of my trip. I certainly like reading and looking through people’s adventures abroad so I hope some of this was interesting! A Long Time Ago… #5 should be in your inboxes tomorrow!
Please share this with your friends and family and ask them to subscribe - that would mean the world to me as I do love sharing my various exploits with you all, and would treasure having more people with me on my writing (and life) journey! June will be the most exciting month yet for this newsletter…
