Nimes Roman Arena
Today we went to Nimes to see where dad is thinking of buying a flat. He goes there a couple of times a week to dance, and as it’s a 45 minute journey and most of his friends live there it makes sense to move.
Like Avignon, Arles and many other towns around Provence, it has Roman roots and buildings several thousand years old around which the rest of the town is built. There is a well preserved Roman arena and, opposite a modern library and arts centre designed by Richard Rogers, a column-clad building called the Maison Carree, which used to be free until they put an exhibition about Roman history in it and started charging for entry.
Maison Carree
I’d never been before, but it seems a nice place. There’s a great indoor market where you can buy just about any food you could imagine, with much of it so beautifully produced that you could serve it up right away if you had friends coming round to dinner. Beyond the market, the city is split into wide boulevards and narrow, older streets that sit in shadow and offer respite from the sun.
We passed by the estate agents to pick up leaflets and looked at the streets where dad would like to buy. There’s one particular quarter with a grocer, a good paper shop and a small restaurant, its leafy streets bordered by some notable landmarks that give it a villagey feel within the city that he’s picked out as his preferred location, and it is certainly nice.
The plan after Nimes had been to head for the Pont du Gard, the three-level aqueduct that carries water to the city from Uzes, skirting a large hill along the way. But as we left Nimes, the clouds rolled in and heavy drops of rain hit the windscreen, and so we cut straight to Uzes and sheltered in the colonnades along the edge of its large town square. It didn’t last long, and was more of a shower than a storm, and so we pressed on to the Pont after an hour or so, parked up and walked across it as the puddles evaporated and turned the air humid.
It doesn’t matter how many times you see it: the Pont du Gard is an impressive feat of civil engineering. It’s stood for centuries longer than the half bridge at Avignon, and yet it looks not much older than a hundred years or so. Only the graffiti confirms that it’s actually much older, as for millennia tourists and travellers have been scratching their names into the soft orange rock from which it’s constructed.
The amazing thing is that it was still a working road bridge until earlier this decade. Now, of course, you can only walk across it (it is a Unesco World Heritage site, after all), and only on the lower level. Dad remembers walking across the very top 40-odd years ago, but that’s no longer possible.
Pont du Gard
The Gard river is calm below the Pont, and a lot of people swim there, jumping in from the rocks to cool down. It’s obviously fairly safe or they wouldn’t let you do it, except that while we were walking along the furthest bank, having passed over the bridge and set off along the other side we noticed two ambulances pull up. They another. And some more, followed by blue-suited medics, who ran down to the river with stretchers.
Leave it to the Americans to leap to wild conclusions, which ranged from a kind jumping in and breaking his back to some sort of mass suicide event. They were even stepping over the safety ropes strung along the edge of the bridge to keep us all back so they could get a better look.
We never did find out what happened, of course, because we didn’t hang around to gawp, but plenty did. Instead, we headed home and, finally, made it to the Cafe Des Arts to toast Rich’s new tenant. A day late thanks to the storm.
No related posts.
[...] Highlights of Lyon? Rather shamefully it was probably the food, which I didn’t think I’d say as we trained out to Les Halles, which is supposed to show off the city’s culinary delights but fell short of the same in Nimes. [...]