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Arles, 24 miles (38km) south of Avignon, is rightly a
popular centre, perhaps the most Provençal of all the
region?s towns. It is full of reminders of its illustrious past, that cover the centuries from the Arena of the early Roman Empire to the blazing yellow cornfields of Vincent van Gogh's paintings.
Tour of Arles
Today Arles is a museum city, proud of its Roman and medieval heritage. Savour its atmosphere on foot; a car is of no help in the narrow streets. Start in the
tree-lined Boulevard des Lices, which is thoroughly modern, with thronged cafés and restaurants, and make for the Place de la République where there is a Roman obelisk of Egyptian stone. This was moved here from the chariot racecourse in a suburb of Trinquetaille.
On one side of the Place is the seventeenth-century hôtel de ville, on another is the west façade of St Trophime church. The west porch is a delight of Romanesque art. There are elaborate carvings in great rhythmical patterns and borrowed motifs from Syrian,
Persian, Nordic and antique Roman sources. Illiterate pilgrims, on their way to St James of Compostela in Spain, received the carved messages of election and
damnation as effectively as a television advertisement today.
Those pilgrims retraced a route followed by St Trophime himself who, it is said, reached the city in
the first century, arriving just as the townsfolk were preparing to sacrifice three youths to their pagan gods. The saint hurled himself at the crowd and pagan priests, shouting that the true ethic was to
love, not slaughter, your fellow man. The priests fled and the city was converted to Christianity. In
the first church that stood on the site, St Augustine was consecrated as the first Bishop of England.
The interior of the church of St Trophime is equally as fine and strong as the exterior. An unusually narrow nave lends exaggerated height to the vaults. Paintings, carvings in wood and ivory, Aubusson tapestries and sarcophagi adorn the church, giving it
a rich, but not overly ornate feel. It is also possible to visit the cloisters of the one-time town cathedral. They are superb: two of the four sides are twelfth-century and are pure Romanesque, while the other two sides were added two centuries later and are Gothic, not quite as pure in their form as there was some attempt to match the earlier work. The carvings, in particular, are quite exquisite.
Just north of Place de la République is the small and shady Place du Forum in which stands a statue of the poet Frédéric Mistral; the wrought ironwork surrounding it is in the form of a ficheiroun, or trident, traditionally used by the cowboys or gardians of the Camargue. Embedded in the angle of the wall of the venerable Hôtel Nord-Pinus are two Corinthian columns which once formed part of a temple adjoining the Roman forum. |
