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Avignon contents

Critical intro

Not as you thought

Palais des
Papes to Rocher des Dombs

Off beaten walk 1

Off beaten walk 2

restaurant recommendations

(Text correction by Mr.Rip Green)

Avignon is the city of the dark "palais des papes", the summer Theatre Festival and the merry bridge where "on y danse tous en rond", a popular French children's song, I learned by the time I was three years old. The popes stayed in Avignon as the capital of Christianity during the whole 14th century, we will go into that history later on.

Festival Avignon

The best advice I can give to those who will stay in Avignon during the hot summer months, is to enjoy the whole scene, street jugglers, street plays from the "off" theatre young actors and actresses who are not allowed to figure in the official program) and everything else that's  going on, from a terrace. Best place for that would be the place de l'Horloge and the place du Palais.

We will loiter along an itinerary, that looks more a labyrinth of medieval streets but we will visit at the same time some monuments and sites ,labeled as a "must". Getting lost will be difficult, because you finally always end up on the very busy cours Jean-Jaures-rue de la Republique, cutting the city in two from north to south, or the walls of the popes wall, still running all around Avignon.
Now let's first arrive! Industrial zones and supermarkets form an unexpected belt especially on the north and eastside. The best way to arrive in Avignon by car is from the south, coming from Saint-Remy. It's along a very dangerous road we arrive at the even more dangerous on ramp dangerous to the bridge over the Durance. We pierce now through more and more narrowing roads in a conglomerate of new ungracious buildings  and finally here it is: the 14th century operetta walls that still more or less surrounds the city . At the outside of all these towers, crenelations, battlements, an endless procession of cars grumbles and  roars along the "rocade", as all roads running around a city are named in France. These cars are also parked in immense queues, exhaust pipes pressing against the medieval walls. The very ochre coloured stones, which was the original colour of this defence work, had to capitulate to endless release of exhaust-fumes, now stand with blackened walls as silent witness.
Victor Hugo, in it's novel "Voyage de 1839" had the most sharp and critical view about Avignon.
""""Seen from afar, this amazing city has something of Roman history, something of the shape of Athens. Its walls, whose stones are as gold colored (he didn't foresee the automobile!! note from Jack) as the Augustus ruins on the Peloponesos, reflect a Greek beauty""""

But now Victor Hugo changes its tone: """But getting closer to the city, the Greek and other antic figures of the old Avignon change to other forms and reveal and manifest itself to Catholicism. The palace of the popes  turns into a gigantic -roman cathedral, while loop-holes appear at the upper side of the walls in the most remarkable shape: the loophole of the popes is the cross!""""

It's remarkable how Victor Hugo changes slowly his sentiments in this travel description of 1839, a initial feeling of enthusiasm moves over to a sense of abhorrence of the ubiquitous, overbearing presence of Catholicism of the worst kind and also about a fact that very few travellers at that time reported: the cruelty of its population.