This photo of Marseille harbour is very beautiful despite having little colour, and a background view that is hard to see clearly. The Marseille it portrays is not especially realistic – very few of the ships in Marseille harbour are decked with rigging – but that hardly matters. The question is, would it make you want to go to Marseille if you saw the picture in a travel brochure (I bought the picture for use in a travel website) – [...]
Archive for June, 2008
One of my favourite cities in the south of France is Toulouse. The city centre is small enough and calm enough to be manageable, but big enough to always have something new to discover. It always seems to be a modern active city, while keeping one eye carefully on the past and the important architectural heritage it contains. Many of the buildings in Toulouse are constructed from the local bricks – small red bricks, left ‘on show’ (ie not covered [...]
The south of France – especially the south-east of France – attracted many artists during the decades between 1890 and 1960, several of whom later became household names with paintings and artworks valued at millions of dollars. This we all know. In a village a few kilometres inland from Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French riviera is a great work of art that will never be sold and is impossible to value – the Matisse chapel at Vence. Matisse himself is said [...]
I’m not always a big enthusiast for the beaches of Languedoc-Roussillon. Most of the Languedoc resorts arose in the 1960s and 1970s when the mosquitoes were cleared away from the region to make way for tourists under the so-called ‘Mission Racine’. A fair number of them are dated, crowded, have too much building and development and little of historical interest. The beaches are often long and sandy…and very windswept and lacking for shade. So my expectations when I visited La [...]
I recently had the opportunity to explore the Camargue region of south-western Provence and two important towns that fall just outside its eastern boundary – Nimes and Arles.
Photo taken in Aigues-Mortes centre In many of the towns you visit in the south of France you will find yourself in open squares lined with trees and narrow streets of medieval houses, and very pretty they are too. The distractions at ground level will keep you occupied, and it is easy to forget to spend a moment to look above you.
