Arles - Romans in Provence

We arrived in Arles, France on October 31, Halloween.  The sun was shining on the Rhone as we walked from the train station to our AirBnb apartment.  

Here is what awaited us.  If you look closely, you'll see my boots in the lower left hand corner of this photo.  These are the cut-stone stairs to our second floor apartment (there's ground floor, 1st floor, 2nd floor, in France).  We carried our luggage up these steps and back down when we left 2 days later. (Fortunately, the first story had a handrail.  But, I felt a little awkward with no handrail.)

This was our neighbourhood. Arles is not a very large city.  After dark, we noticed that there were lots of Halloween decorations and even a few kids in costume trick-or-treating in the streets, going from shop to shop.  Most people live in apartments, so I imagine that shop-to-shop is the traditional thing here.  It turns out that what they celebrate here is Tousaint (which I think started as Toute Saints), All Saints Day on November 1.

I only photograph the backs of children.  It just seems rude and creepy to show their faces, but some of those costumes were really cute.  One older girl even tried to scare us (with a smile on her face).  It was fun.

Although that first apartment was very nice and modern, we moved to another apartment (on the ground floor, thank you very much) after a couple days.  That is the way we planned it from the beginning because the second one wasn't available until then and, now, we have been here for 4 days.

What we discovered over these 6 days is that Arles is an extremely old site.  There are buildings and ruins that date back to the Roman Empire, over 2000 years old.  (Note: We went to the local tourist information office and bought a pass that gets us into all the ancient sites to walk around and into 3 of the 4 available museums.  It is common, I think for these passes to be available; we had a similar pass in Madrid for their 3 big art museums.  This time, we got a discount on the pass by showing our local housing reservation and a discount at the museum that was not included, the Van Gogh Foundation, because we had the pass. Win-win!)

The Roman Arena in Arles seated about 20,000 people.  It is estimated that the arena was as tall at that tower.  Roman society was separated from each other in the seating; you were seated by status.  The usual entertainments were races, hunts for wild animals, gladiator competitions, etc.  

Now, we have to see the Roman arena in Orange, France.  It is considered the best example in the world of a Roman coliseum.

One of the views from the top of the Arena tower. (Yes, I climbed it and I'm proud.)

I prefer the Roman theatre in Arles.  I think it would have been more interesting entertainment.  This one only seated about 15,000 people, though.  I wonder where all those people came from?  I thought it was a fairly small town.

Saint Trophime's Church

Entrance to St. Trophime's Church

Saint Trophime's cloisters

The Place de la République - St. Trophime's cloister and church on the right, Hotel de Ville (City Hall) in the centre behind the obelisk fountain, and Chapelle Saint Anne on the left.  

Obelisque fountain in Place de la République

I don't know what this place is, but it has a great, very old door.

The Baths of Constantine - we had a pass for this but could never find the entrance.  In fact, it took us two days, off and on, to actually find it.  There is no signage.

We were unable (or unwilling) to see the Alscamps (Roman and medieval graveyard) and the Cryptoportico (the underground corridors that formed the foundation for the 1st century BC Roman forum complex that is now gone).  All that remains of the Forum is one column and a section of wall that was incorporated into a building in the Place du Forum.

And then, there are the Mediatheque (Library) and the Libraries (bookstores), which as my friend Mary pointed out, I can not ignore.

Note the very old wall incorporated into a very modern library.

This, on the other hand, is a librarie (a bookstore).

And, this librarie.

Last, there are the museums: Musee Reattu, Musee de la Camargue, Museun (sic) Arlaten, Musee departmental Arles Antique, and the Foundation Van Gogh.  We were not able to go to the Carmargue because it was way outside of town in a nature reserve or the Arlaten because it is under construction until 2019 (convenient excuse :).

The Musee Reattu primarily houses the work of Jacques Reattu, a neo-classical painter.  The Picasso drawings that we were looking forward to apparently are no longer there.  However, the thing that most interested me was that this building was the site of the Grand Priory of the Knights of Malta.  (Yes, I still have my romantic images of the Templars and the Knights of Malta, Ivanhoe and the romantic crusades; tempered with the reality of what a savage, corrupt and elitist era that was.)

This was a rather Picasso-esque sculpture.  The photo doesn't do it justice.

Fireplace in the Grand Priory, heck with the art

View of the Rhone from the building. (Can you tell I'm a little burned out on art?"

The security guard pointed out that ladies of this period were sewn into their dresses.  There are no closures.

The Foundation Van Gogh museum was not as impressive to me.  It had a lot of contemporary art mixed with old black and white prints of peasants in the fields and a huge collection of photographs.

This is the one Van Gogh in the museum.  The rest apparently are in Amsterdam.  It's photographed at an angle because of the glare off the piece.

I liked this Japanese print, but know nothing about it. :(

Beautiful old room with a fully erected double tent inside.  There is no entrance to the tent and it is patched together with black duct tape.  Curious, and reminds me of my daughter's tent installation at one of her art exhibitions.  However, hers was much more beautiful and you could crawl inside and play SuperMario sitting on pillows.

Such a beautiful photograph of a bouquet of irises

This was painted directly on the wall, as were at least 6 others.  This was my favourite. (Yes, my autocorrect is British.  What can I do?"

Here I am on the very interesting roof of the Van Gogh.

The rooftops of Arles from the Van Gogh

Finally, my favourite museum, Musee departmental Arles Antique.  I cannot pass up a museum of antiquities or archaeology and this is a really good one, if rather small.  The building is new and there is a lot of room for more exhibits.  Currently, the museum is literally centered around a Roman barge that was discovered in 2013 in the Rhone River.

The head of Mithra

From Constantine's Baths

This was probably a funerary piece.  There are many coffins, sarcophagi, and headstones here.

The Romans had some rather beautiful jewellery.  In Cadiz, there were even more beautiful pieces excavated from the much older sites - Roman and Phoenician jewellery.

Okay, now I know where I got these feet - wherever this guy got his.

This is what the Roman plumbing looked like - rather ingenious.

Gaius Cesar, may I say, was a bit of a hottie, as opposed to these guys. (Pardon my superficiality.)

Hadrian

Tiberius

Lucius Cesar

The huge barge that was excavated from the bottom of the Rhone 4 years ago.  It was apparently carrying rocks .

These are amphori that were used as shipping containers.  The shape of each amphora told you what was inside - fish, wine, etc. - no label needed.

There were many of these mosaic jigsaw puzzles.

So, tomorrow, we hop on the train to Barcelona.  Things seem to have settle down there, so we pored over the AirBnb listings and chose an apartment to stay in for 5 nights.  I'm SO excited.  We thought we might not be able to go there at all and it is one of our dream destinations.  Besides, it's getting pretty darn cold here in France and Steve and I are both sensitive to cold now.  Heading South!