Avignon rooftops
Wednesday is market day in St Remy. So that’s what we did. We spent the morning close to home, wandering through the winding streets looking at the fruit and veg and the cheese and fish stalls that shame our market at home, and at the photos, paintings and carved wooden trinkets laid out to tempt the tourists.
The market is a stream of stalls that cuts a twisted path through the tightly-packed buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years. They pick up close to one of the many plaques that mark a spot where Van Gogh painted one of his pictures of the town, sweep past the fountain that commemorates Nostadamus’ birth in the town and ends up by the carousel opposite the church.
It’s a lively way to kill a couple of hours, after which we headed back to the house empty handed – as we’d expected – and made plans to spend the rest of the day in Avignon.
This was to be our first link with home since arriving in France: it’s twinned with Colchester, just a few miles up the A12 from where we live. It’s a small city with a glorious past. Like so many Provencal towns it has impressive walls, but its most notable features are undoubtedly its incomplete bridge and the Pope’s palace.
The bridge did once stretch right across the river, but seemingly nobody could quite work out the currents, and the furthest half was always being washed away. Eventually someone had the bright idea of just giving up on it and leaving it like that, looking like a great stone pier to nowhere that was eventually immortalised in song (Sur Le Pont d’Avignon) and now that’s what most people associate the town with.
Whatever the reason for building the bridge, it’s a shame that this, rather than the Pope’s Palace has become its symbol. I’ve not been inside, and we didn’t venture in today, either – just walked up behind it so that we could look out over the terracotta roofs – but the grand palace that lines one side of the main square at the head of the town was the centre of the Christian faith in the 14th century, when the pope and his entourage fled unrest in Rome and settled in Provence. From here, seven ‘official’ popes guided their global flock until it was safe to return to Rome and build the Vatican as it stands today.
The only trouble is, when the last official pope left and subsequently died, rival popes carried on in Avignon, which must have led to no end of confusion over the years as each camp fought for supremacy over the other.
Anyway, there is no pope there any more, and after the French Revolution the palace was seized by the state so it’s not papal territory, either. It does look good, though, but if you have seen the Vatican in real life then it doesn’t even come close. It must have been impressive when it was first built.
It’s not actually that curved and Disney-esque in real life: that’s just the way the panorama got stitched.
So we kicked around there for a while, watching the world pass by on various scooters and street trains as the kids of the town span around on their heads and knees to the music they were blasting across the square, then headed back home to eat, with plans to head into town for a drink.
You know what they say about best-laid plans, though and, inevitably they came to nothing as the clouds rolled across and we were treated to a spectacular thunder storm that barely pierced the muggy night air.
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