Welcome to the land of sunshine!
Provence!
Land of sunshine! Advertisements tout the wines
of the Sun, the freeway of the Sun, the fabrics
of the Sun... The city of Nice brags of 299 sunny
days a year. “Oh, those who don't believe
in the sun here are real infidels,” wrote
Vincent Van Gogh, whose discovery of Provençal
light changed his life and the history of painting.
The bright, hot Mediterranean summers make aromatic
herbs more pungent, give wines a higher degree of
alcohol, and draw vacationers from all over the
world.
Outsiders have been traveling to Provence since
Greek merchants began to set up trading posts around
600 BC, buying metals from tribes settled there
in Paleolithic times. Prehistoric sites and caverns
remain near Nice and Monaco, Greek vestiges survive
at Antibes and in the Hellenes' most powerful center,
Marseille. A Greek ship lifted from this city's
harbor by Jacques Cousteau's team stands proud in
the History Museum on Rue Neuve Saint-Martin. The
Roman chronicler Tacitus once described Marseille
as “a happy mixture of Greek urbanity combined
with Gallic temperance.” This spirit produced
Marseille's most famous culinary specialty, the
fish soup sunny with saffron, called bouillabaisse.
Next to come were Celtic tribes from the north,
fierce headhunters whose capital city stood near
Aix-en-Provence. They were conquered in the second
century BC by the Romans, who left their mark on
everything in Provence for centuries after: the
language, the legal system, agricultural methods
and tools, architecture. Orange, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence,
Arles, and Fréjus still have impressive and
beautifully preserved Roman monuments, and Arles's
new archaeological museum is one of the most fascinating
in Europe.
In medieval times, the picturesque perched villages
of Provence came into being, houses clustered high
up around a church and fortified castle: Gordes,
Oppède, and Peter Mayle's Lacoste in the
Luberon, Moustiers-Sainte-Marie and Biot on the
Riviera among them. Les Baux-de-Provence remains
one of the most striking of these vertiginous villages,
especially at sunset when one can almost hear the
voices of former lords throwing captives off the
castle's battlements, or the songs of troubadours
courting Alix of the golden hair. In the fourteenth
century, Avignon became one of Europe's major cities
when a series of seven popes chose to live there
instead of in Rome, building the majestic Papal
Palace where theater festivals are held now every
summer. From this time, too, dates the famous Pont
d'Avignon, of which only a graceful fragment remains—enough
to dance on still, however... Fifteenth-century
Provence was dominated by the powerful personality
of Good King René; a poet and musician of
talent, patron of the arts and an innovative gardener,
René lost almost every battle he ever fought.
Shortly after his death, Provence became the property
of the French Crown.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were prosperous
in Provence: the cities filled up with fountains
and elegant town houses with wrought-iron balconies.
Aix-en-Provence provides one of the most exquisite
examples: its summer opera festival is held in the
former archbishop's palace. The Riviera mountain
town of Grasse was also rebuilt in the eighteenth
century, though it was already famous for its flowers
and perfumes. In that era too, Tarascon, Avignon,
and Orange began manufacturing Indian-inspired fabrics
with great success. The Souleïado company in
Tarascon and the Olivades in nearby Saint-Étienne-du-Grès are the two leading examples that remain today.
The birth of the Riviera
Provence
takes its name from the Romans' affectionate nickname
for the region, nostra provincial,
“another Italy,” as Pliny called it.
In Roman times Provence extended all the way to
Spain! The western boundary is for most people marked
by the Rhône River—but Arles, on the
far side, somehow always finds itself included in
Provence. Frédéric Mistral, a nineteenth-century
Nobel Prize--winning poet who championed the area's
regional culture, established his Provençal
museum in Arles. It still has one of the best collections
of local antiques, though for antique shopping,
the weekend and holiday fairs at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue,
east of Avignon, have achieved great renown.
The Camargue, just south of Arles, offers yet another
landscape, another world, another cuisine. This
is the delta land of the Rhône, a magic blend
of fresh and salt water similar to the lower Mississippi.
There is nothing else like it anywhere in Europe.
Here houses made of mud and straw are surrounded
by expansive rice paddies. Here rare birds migrate,
shellfish abound, and cowboys called gardians
herd small, tough bulls around groves of wild tamarisk.
These bulls are not killed in the local arenas,
where they return to fight many times to the public's
enthusiastic applause. But they do sometimes end
up as bull stew, with black olives in a heavy, dark
sauce.
The northern limit of Provence corresponds roughly
to the realm of the olive tree in the west, this
symbol of eternity which has nourished the people
of Provence since the Greeks showed them how to
graft it productively. In the east, however, the
Alpes de Haute Provence's high, wild valleys are
no longer Mediterranean but mountain country, with
good ski resorts. Here, too, nestles the hill town
of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, a producer of colorful
faience since the eighteenth century. Nearby, the
Verdon River Canyon offers untamed, breathtaking
landscapes.
The eastern boundary, the Italian border, was set
by the treaty of 1860. Menton, which snuggles up
to the frontier, is friendly and picturesque, with
an ocher-tinted old town, a lively market, and a
lemon festival in February. The sheltered Bay of
Garavan at Menton benefits from one of Europe's
mildest climates, a boon for the city's famed Belle
Époque gardens.
The southern limit of Provence alone poses no problems:
it is the great inland sea—media terra. Major
ports like Marseille and Toulon brim with bustling
energy, but there are dozens of smaller fishing
villages such as Cassis (famous for its white wine),
Le Lavandou, or Saint-Tropez which has lured so
many generations of artists and film-makers. Despite
problems of overfishing and pollution, the Mediterranean
continues to supply an amazing variety of seafood
and fish: sea bass (bar or more commonly loup de
mer), red mullet (rouget barbet), and sculpin (rascasse,
indispensable in bouillabaisse), sea bream (dorade),
and the “poor man's lobster,” the densely
fleshed monkfish or anglerfish (baudroie or lotte).
Enchanted landscapes
Though the coast has much to offer, inland Provence
above all has charmed the world with its legendary
scenery: “the familiar prospects of vines,
olives, cypresses” as British writer Lawrence
Durrell puts it, “enchanted landscapes of
the European heart.”
In the backcountry of course, there is little fresh
fish, but dried salt cod has been a staple for centuries,
used in dishes like the grand aïoli still served
in most villages on feast days: platters of poached
salt cod surrounded by colorful vegetables with
a garlicky mayonnaise. Codfish also appears at Christmas
Eve supper...followed by the Thirteen Desserts of
Provence, which symbolize Christ and the twelve
apostles.
These inland regions where wild limestone ridges
contrast with manicured farms and small cities have
much diversity: the Var départment
between Nice and Marseille produces charming wines,
and is still largely unexplored. On Mont Ventoux,
north of Avignon, lavender fields melt into the
sky in mid-summer. The lower slopes are decked with
vineyards, cherry and apricot orchards, fields of
wheat and the winter wheat known as épeautre,
which local chefs turn into a gourmet treat. The
Ventoux is also famous for its truffles, sold at
the market town of Carpentras.
Between Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Arles
rise Van Gogh's beloved Alpilles hills. Here a patchwork
of irrigation canals and cypress hedging enclose
plots of artichokes, oak-leaf and batavia lettuce,
early strawberries, zucchini, tomatoes and eggplant,
artichokes, melons, asparagus, or pear and apple
cordons. On the scrubby hills, redolent of thyme,
rosemary, and sage, placid sheep still graze. Today
the opulent country life of these vivid valleys
proves so attractive to footloose cosmopolitans
that Saint-Rémy has supplanted the Riviera
and the Luberon hills as the most fashionable place
to live in southern France.
The keynote of life in Provence today is rustic
refinement, a sensual ideal of good yet simple living
which has inspired a whole generation of cooks all
over France. Chefs from Alsace, Lille, and Brittany
are slipping little rougets aux olives in among
their local specialties, catering to a clientele
more and more insistent on the fresh fish, herbs,
and young vegetables which have characterized Provençal
cuisine for centuries. Olive oil often replaces
butter and cream in Lyon, goose fat in Alsace and
the Southwest, as the most elegant—and above
all most healthful—enrichment. At a time when
many Americans consider French cooking over-elaborate,
looking rather to Italy for inspiration, Provence
offers the best of both worlds: it combines Mediterranean
country roots with French savoir vivre.
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