Palaces, Popes & Patisseries
We realised two things simultaneously this morning as we were heading out the door:
Our tour started in 15 minutes and we had a 15 minute walk to the meeting spot so breakfast was looking unlikely.
Hey, don’t we still have that box of petite cakes that we’d bought from our favourite patisserie in Nice - in the car?
And so, the logical conclusion was…to just eat cakes for breakfast, though the fact they were ‘petite’ made us feel slightly better. I haven’t eaten that much sugar in the morning since Easter Sunday.
After having been here for a few weeks now, I’ve learnt to lower my expectations when it comes to the French coffee, but Rossco fresh off the plane, still held out hope he’d meet a piccolo he’d like. I whipped out some French and ordered him a coffee (surprising myself no end that she could actually understand me) but as Ross pressed the said cup to his expectant lips, the look on his face said it all and was followed by a quick, regretful: “I think I’m gonna have to throw this out”. Maybe he’ll have to start drinking tea.
The first thing that strikes you when you walk down the main street of Avignon is just how green it is. There are tall, leafy plane trees lining the streets all through the city, giving shade to the huge number of outdoor cafes in the squares and bringing colour to the otherwise uniformly pale limestone buildings around town.
Not knowing much about Avignon, we decided to join a small group walking tour with our extremely knowledgable guide, Jeremy, Our first stop was the big limestone St Agricol church - so old it even had Roman boulders in the foundations. The legend goes, that Agricol arrived in town armed with a muster of storks to help with a snake plague that was gripping the population. The hungry storks made a meal of the snakes - literally - restoring stability to the townsfolk, earning Aggro a sainthood and a big old church named in his honour.
Avignon sure does have a multitude of impressive buildings, including the Theatre, now used as an opera house and adorned with a plethora of statues and the Town Hall with the cutest little clock tower, overlooking the Place de l’Horlage square below. Inside the bell tower there’s a little wooden couple that have been standing face-to-face since the 19th century when they were added to the 14th century tower. Every hour, on the hour, the little guy would lean over and give his sweetheart a flower. She would lift her bouquet and strike the bell, sending it pealing out across the land. The bells still vigorously mark the hour but old age has struck the little couple and they’ve sadly siezed up - hey it happens to the best of us - left only to gaze down at the bustling square below.
Like lots of European cities, Avignon was hit badly by the dreaded black plague back in the 1300s. As a way of keeping the infected out of the church, they erected little statues of Mary and Jesus high up on the corners of all the buildings, effectively making the whole city a church, where they could conduct outdoor services. The little statues are so cute and unless Jeremy had pointed them out, we’d have completely missed them. There are also lots of buildings with painted windows and shutters, the windowless walls apparently a result of the window tax, where you paid more, the more light you let in.
The biggest and most impressive of all the very impressive buildings in Avignon was the Pope’s Palace, its imposing limestone facade and gleaming gold Mary atop its roof, visible for miles.
When the papacy was moved from Italy to Avignon in the 1300s and seven popes actually ruled from here, they did away with the black and white smoke system altogether. When the new pope was elected, he’d just have to pop his head out the window and give a little royal wave. Rossco thought he’d try it out and appeared in the window to wave to the crowds below but no one batted an eyelid. I guess he’s about 700 years too late.
Currently there’s a really cool modern art installation at the Palace, by a modern artist, Jean-Michael Othoniel, involving giant hanging sculptures of big glass balls, dangling from the ceilings. It’s such a contrast between the ancient and the new! There’s also a secret room in the palace (not so secret anymore), its walls covered with murals and scenes from the everyday life of a pope from back in the day. This room was mysteriously bricked in and locked up for at least a century, meaning the pictures are still so vivid and colourful; just amazing!
We toured the kitchen, with a ridiculously tall exhaust fan - an easy 50 metres up - no exaggeration - and the giant dining hall where they served up roasted peacock, leaving the head on the platter so they knew they weren’t being duped by a substituted turkey (Give me turkey any day!). The dining hall was also where they held the conclaves. Jeremy pointed out the hidden Eiffel Tower in one of the statues, slipped in when some palace renos were done in the 1970s.
Our tour finished at the Avignon bottle-o, where an excitable local wine enthusiast gave us a little tasting of his favourite local drops and a lesson on the grapes they crushed to make them.
After our thorough look around Avignon, we climbed back into our vee-hickle and made our way to the magnificent Pont du Gard, a fully intact Roman aqueduct bridge built in the 1st century! They sure did build things to last. Below the bridge was a great little meandering river full of families splashing around in canoes and an inordinate amount of kids chasing butterflies with nets. Must have been on sale.
We drove on, past fields and fields of sunflowers that would’ve been so beautiful had they been in bloom and not just sad shrivelled up heads on tall sticks, hahaha. It was surreal to see Barcelona pop up on the French road signs too.
We have now arrived in Montpellier and checked into our very cute (another word for tiny) airbnb apartment. It’s an ancient stone building with exposed stone walls, really high ceilings and archways. They’ve popped in a mezzanine level so that the really high ceilings and archways now become really low ceilings and archways that leave me thankful I am so vertically challenged (though even I have to duck!) Put it this way, it’s not the sort of place you’d rent if you were in the NBA. The mezzanine level is accessed by a precariously steep “staircase” that’s really just a ladder on a slight lean, with a thick, fraying rope to hang onto as you ascend and descend. Climbing up you feel like you’re channelling Sir Edmund Hilary (I could’ve used a sherpa), while the climb down feels like an abseiling adventure!
