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St.Remy-Nostradamus-Van Gogh

Glanum

Provence -Saint Remy -Nostradamus and Van Gogh 

This itinerary starts from Cavaillon, taking the D 99 Towards Saint-Remy. This is the departement des Bouches du Rhone, which you can see on the car license plates ending by 13. Left of the road we can see the crenated walls of the Alpilles chain and on the right the fertile soils, once given to the Roman soldiers as reward for their heroic deeds. The D 99 is one of these magnificent but also dangerous, because lined with plane trees, Provence roads you better watch out and concentrate.

As soon we survived the winding road and formula 1 racing French over takers and arrive in SAINT-REMY we are plunged right away in a village atmosphere with the boulevards surrounded by sunny terraces. SAINT-REMY is the exact type of the Provencal town, charming, surrounding the ancient center, filled with small and narrow streets crushed by the sun. Walk along some beautiful buildings like the hotel Mistral de Mondragon (a museum of the Alpilles now. it has a magnificent staircase and interior courtyard. The hotel de Sade houses the archeological collections of the Glanum excavations.
It’s an idea to go and have a drink the busy and popular terrace “Chez Sylvio” to prepare ourselves to this visit of the village, the excavations at Glanum and “Les Antiques” like is called a sort of Arc de Triomphe. The hospice of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole is also to visit the more Van Gogh stayed there from May 1889 to May 1890.
Saint-Remy is the birthplace of Nostradamus (1503-1566) and lived in the rue du Barri.

Nostradamus fountain

His father was a Jewish doctor converted to Catholicism. He studied medicine in Montpellier where he was a friend of Rabelais. Outside that he studied also grammaticism, logics, mathematics, music and geometry. He traveled a lot, mastered plague epidemics and settled down in Salon-de-Provence where he wrote his famous “Centuries”, full of double sided prophecies. He died on 2nd of July in 1566, exactly on the day he had foreseen.
And if you’re a Van Gogh fan, you should know that for the100st birthday of the death of Van Gogh the hotel Estrine was completely renovated to house a museum, a “Centre d’Art Presence” without the slightest work of Van Gogh (too expensive). You can look at audio-visual info about the life of Van Gogh and it houses sometimes interesting contemporary exhibitions. An excellent initiative of the Tourist board was the placement of reproduction posters on the places where the artist painted. But the intense Provence sun has quickly made an end to the quality of these images.
When Van Gogh arrives in 1889 in the hospice Saint-  Paul - de - Mausole, he will live in fact in a genuine nut house, where mental patients are cared after since medieval times. Van Gogh lived here from May 8 1889 to May 10 1890 in the adjacent psychiatric asylum.  He planted his easel in the garden and painted, painted hundreds of works. He was not allowed to leave the hospital.  His tormented "Champs d'oliviers" and "Nuit etoilee", are from that period. His mental health had degraded a lot already and his tormented soul had its peak with those two works, veritable vision of the apocalypse. In a letter to his brother Theo he mentions the roaring and loud shouting in the corridors where the other patients had sometimes their mental attacks. A friend of mine told me that he heard the same roaring in the eighties, when he rang at the main entrance and asked if he could see the two rooms where the painter had lived and worked. After having been closed very long for the public (it was still a mad-house), they built now two new rooms in the corner of the main building and open for visitors. If you walk around the complex on the right you can see a walled vegetable garden that used to be a cornfield, painted many times by Van Gogh.

Bibliography

"La Provence devient francaise", by Roger Duchène (Fayard, Paris 1986) "Guide de la Provence mysterieuse" and "Provence Antique"by Jean-Paul Clebert (Ed.Sand, 1986), "Guide du Routard Provence 1998 (Ed.Hachette), "Provence", by Jacques-Louis Delpal (ed.Natahn Paris 1987), "A guide to Provence", by Michael Jacobs (ed;Viking, London 1988), "The Roman remains of Southern France", by James Bromwich (Routledge London 1993)