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An easy day trip from Avignon
includes the fortress village of Les Baux de Provence and the Roman
town of Glanum. Les Baux sits on a rock spur (which would probably
be called a mesa if it were in the American Southwest). Rising from
the rock is a medieval village dominated by the ruins of a fortified
castle and citadel. The castle was the home of a line of fierce
warriors who, in the 12th century, were the feudal lords of much of
Provence. More recently, Les Baux has given its name to bauxite, the
ore that yields most of the world’s aluminum. The ore was originally
discovered on land near Les Baux, although it’s no longer mined
there.
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The best time to explore the castle is late in the afternoon. The tour buses and crowds have gone, and the crumbling ruins are bathed in a golden light. |
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The castle is also an outdoor museum of medieval weapons.
The displays include a trebuchet, a kind of catapult for hurling large
objects over city walls during a siege.
Just outside St-Rémy de Provence is the Plateau des Antiques, which was the site of Glanum. It was originally a Ligurian settlement (they were the original Celtic inhabitants before the Greeks and Romans arrived) probably named for their deity, Glan. Greek merchants from Massalia (now Marseille) arrived in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE; they built a typically Greek town and Hellenized its name to Glanon. When the Romans moved in by the 1st century CE they decided that the Greek layout wasn’t to their liking. So in typical Roman fashion they razed it, rebuilt it to Roman specifications, and Latinized the name to Glanum. Glanum was abandoned after the Germanic tribes invaded in around 300 CE. The village of St-Rémy that later grew around the site was founded and named by monks from Reims, who presumably had far less respect for Ligurian deities than did their Greek and Roman forbears.
The Municipal Arch originally marked the entrance to Glanum. It stood
on the main road leading to Rome, and undoubtedly served to impress
barbarian travellers with the power of Roman authority. It was
certainly impressive enough to have survived the fall of Rome, even as
the rest of Glanum was buried until excavations began in 1921. The
ceiling of the arch has unusual hexagonal carvings.
Next to the Municipal Arch is the Mausoleum. It’s 18 meters high, and
one of the best preserved of all Roman monuments. Dating from 30 CE
(and most likely contemporaneous with the Municipal Arch) it’s
actually not a tomb but rather a monument to the to three grandsons of
Augustus Caesar.
The excavations at Glanum are mainly foundations, with a few
reconstructed buildings and columns. A little imagination goes a long
way toward filling in the details when walking around the ruins. Here
are the columns of a temple to Valetudo, a goddess of health, from
around 20 BCE.
One part of Glanum that doesn’t require imagination is Taberna
Romana. This is a little restaurant right next to the ruins that serves
what the proprietors claim are authentic Roman recipes. You can sample
cicerona, a paste of chickpeas flavored with cumin that’s more
than a little like hummus, that staple of Middle Eastern and
Greek cuisine. There’s also samsa, a mixture of chopped olives
that’s purportedly the ancestor of the Provençal tapinade.
For dessert you can have goat cheese in honey, flavored with mint. While
I can’t say how authentic these foods are (I suspect the recipes have
been refracted through the lens of modern French culinary sensibility),
they make a delicious lunch that’s a highlight of a visit to Glanum.
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