On 2 June last, Nîmes was inaugurated with great fanfare its brand new Musée de la Romanitéa cutting-edge building designed by Elizabeth de Portzamparc. The aim is to magnify the Gallo-Roman collections - 25,000 items in all - bearing witness to the city's rich past, so rich that it was once nicknamed "French Rome". As if to underline the point, the Musée de la Romanité opens directly onto the arena, one of the best-preserved monuments in the Roman world. You can now contemplate it, almost touch it, from a whole new angle, as the museum's restaurant - as well as a huge private area - has been installed on a roof top.
As we shall see later, this unique blend of antiquity and ultra-modernity is virtually unique to Nîmes in the French landscape. And this has been the case since the 1980s, when the city of the Gard region was brought out of its lethargy by its mayor, the charismatic Jean Bousquet. It's simply incredible, almost unique, such an abundance of big names in architecture and design in a city of just over 150,000 inhabitants: Foster, Nouvel, Wilmotte, Kurokawa, Takis, Starck... They're all here, or nearly all.
Nîmes, a small town
So where should you start exploring the city? The museum or the monuments? Basically, it's up to you: the historic city is very small, the remains - and what remains - are within walking distance of each other, and you can even discover them by segway. So it's only natural that we should start at the bullring, symbol of the city we begin. Date of birth: end of the 1st century AD. Shape: ellipse measuring 133 by 101 metres. Height: 21 metres on two levels. Seating: 34 rows. Capacity: 24,000 spectators. Original purpose: exclusively for gladiatorial and animal fights, where no detail was missed from any seat.
The venue is both gigantic and human in scale. You can see your neighbour on the bleachers opposite, you can even apostrophise him. And there's no holding back, whether it's a rock concert or an opera show, a bullfight or a Camargue race organised during the Whitsun feria, or a historical re-enactment. Every year at the end of April, there are great Roman games, with parades of over 500 extras in the streets and set themes. After Cleopatra and the Barbarians, this year it was Spartacus...
Nîmes knows how to make something new out of something old. And very well indeed. The former Nemausus does not skimp on strong architectural gestures to magnify its ancient past, such as the Carré d'Art designed by Norman Foster or the new Musée de la Romanité, designed by Elisabeth de Portzamparc and opened in June.
It's great fun, with parades and fights in the arena, and anyone can dress up. The old town's shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurant waiters are not to be outdone either. The result is some very exotic scenesLike the owner of a luxury grocery shop covered in Visigoth furs, or Romans and slaves in fairly good spirits supporting each other arm in arm in the white streets in the early hours of the morning.
This is the second remarkable Roman monument to be highlighted by the city of Nîmes as part of its UNESCO candidacy: the Maison Carréeten minutes' walk from the arena. Virtually intact, sublime in its proportions, it is in fact a temple built between AD II and V and dedicated to the adopted grandsons of Augustus. Inside, the film Nemausus, recounting the birth of Nîmes, is shown. In response to the elegance of the building and the purity of its lines, in 1993 the English architect Norman Foster built a glass cube, the Carré d'Art, which is very daring in its modernity. It was also highly controversial, at the time anyway. Rather like Beaubourg in Paris...
It houses the Museum of Contemporary Art, which focuses not only on Anglo-Saxon and Germanic trends, but also on Mediterranean identity. Claude Viallat, Arman and César too. A little further on, overlooking the Jardin de la Fontaine, France's first public garden (1745-1755), stands the Tour Magne, one of the remains of the wall that enclosed the city in ancient times. The climb is certainly a bit strenuous, but the 360° view is well worth it once you've reached the top. You can see the whole town, of course, but beyond that you can see the Cévennes, Mont Ventoux and the Alpilles.
Just 2 hours 55 minutes from Paris, Nîmes is a city of architecture. Ancient architecture, of course; contemporary architecture, as we've seen; but also Renaissance or classical architecture, from the days when the silk trade made its fortune. Which is not to say that Nîmes is a dead city, an open-air museum as they say. In fact, it's a lively cityA place where everyday life, far from supermarkets and chain shops, is carried out in the old-fashioned way, with grocery shops, haberdashery shops and fashion boutiques such as you won't find any more. Halles too, and what halles they are! Fruit and vegetables, of course, but above all speciality shops to die for.
We say hello to the shopkeeper we've known since Methuselah, we say hello to the neighbour, this and that. We taste and we taste again, business tourists like the others, and even a little more, because we take special care of them. For example, just around the corner from Lolita Perez's picholine olives, there are Thierry Bosc's little pâtés, a Nîmes speciality made from cylinders stuffed with pork or veal and covered with a beautifully serrated cap. A real treat.
We'll also be stopping off around Nîmes' real specialityAnd the most famous of all: brandade de morue (codfish brandade). You'll find it everywhere, in the market hall and on restaurant tables, but without doubt, one of the best is the one produced for four generations by La Nîmoise. The owner, Mylène Mouton, is the best ambassador for this product, offering generous tastings in her shop. But why this Mediterranean speciality made from fish caught far away in the North Atlantic? The answer is that there are plenty of salt marshes around Nîmes. As a result, the fishermen who came from the cold supplied themselves with salt in the Gulf of Lion, using their dried cod as a bargaining chip.
Sète, between high art and the art of living
Sète is certainly unique in its close links with the creative world. Whether they were born here - Brassens, Di Rosa, Valéry, Vilar - or Sétois by adoption, such as Agnès Varda or Robert Combas, artists have an elective affinity with this city of soul and history.
This pronounced taste for the pleasures of eating and drinking wellYou'll find it everywhere in Occitanie. It's there, everywhere. Not so much in the way the dishes are prepared, as in Provence, but rather in the specialities that are given pride of place. For example, in Sète, a little further down the coast, there's no escaping the tielle, a sort of octopus pie with a spicy tomato sauce; or the stuffed mussels and squid, or the macaroonade with brageoles or the sardines in escabeche... Among other things, because Sétoise cuisine, which started out as Languedoc and Mediterranean, has been enriched over time and through waves of migration by Italian and North African contributions...
As elsewhere, and even more so than elsewhere, the halls lend themselves perfectly to the game of discovery and tasting, a bit like that practised by our Spanish neighbours. Tables have been set up for this purpose, and visitors are free to get to grips with them, tapas styleThere's also a bistro-counter inside the halls for drinks. Joe Le Cooker even organises cooking cessions. These are a big hit, especially with business groups of up to 21 people, who take the opportunity to learn about the town and its traditions before discovering it in person. The same goes for the half-day wine tours organised from the Halles, and the same goes for the visit to Azaïs-Polito, the town's last traditional canning factory.
A rare occurrence in old France, Sète is a "modern" townThe city is located on an island wedged between the Etang de Thau and the Mediterranean. It was born at the arrival of the Canal du Midi at the behest of Louis XIV, and lounges along canals that have a touch of the Serenissima about them. Pleasure boats moored right in the centre of town, a forest of masts, plump trawlers - including one, the Louis Nocca, which can be visited and even privatised for a non-conformist cocktail party for 80 people - nets to be fished on the quays and a succession of bistros and restaurants with evocative names: the Marine, the Bistrot du port or the Mauvaise réputation, in reference to the poet, no doubt.
The town of Sète has paid Brassens back for the love he showed it in his day. It has even built a museum for him, a space entirely dedicated to him, right next to the Le Py cemetery where the artist is buried beside his tree. Brassens in his museumBrassens in very contemporary surroundings. Everywhere. On the public bench set up on a square in the centre of the building, in the photos, in the videos of his shows and interviews, on the posters... The whole thing is remarkably staged using a wide range of techniques and materials and, above all, never takes itself too seriously. Naturally, you'll leave the show with a song in your head... We've all got one!
Sauve qui peut, wine and pastis first
The soul of Georges Brassens is everywhere in Sète, and not just on the beach. The Pointe Courte, for example. A world apart near the SNCF station, a peninsula jutting out into the Etang de Thau and filled with tiny, simple houses and shacks dangling from their stilts, where nets are hung. Everywhere, chairs and tables are out on the pavement, just waiting for the aperitif to be served so they can enjoy the simple pleasure of being there. At first, our friend Georges and his friends poured a few pints...
Another native of the area, another man of spirit, another poet born on the "singular island": Paul Valéry, who also has the right to his own museum, a superb and very luminous building also located near a cemetery. But what a cemetery! Without doubt the most beautiful marine cemetery in France. Sun-drenched as it is, it's even very cheerful. Tours are organised here, as a cemetery is ultimately the best teller of a town's history. You have a complete view of the cemetery and the sea, from the terrace of the Paul Valéry Museum The museum houses 300 works by the artist, including 80 manuscripts, as well as 4,000 items dating from the 19th century to the present day, including paintings by Robert Combas and Hervé Di Rosa, the leaders of the Figuration Libre movement, which was the darling of the 1980s.
Although they were not the friends chosen by Montaigne and La Boétie, due to the different eras in which they lived, Brassens and Valéry had a special affection for their home town. Sète pays tribute to this shared love with two fine museums showcasing their poetic art.
Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, we can say that it was the spirit associated with Figuration Libre that launched Sète on the path to democratising artIt's painting for everyone, painting that goes outside the walls of institutions, with or without permission. In Sète, you'll find the MaCO in the Hauts district, which, with its no-frills houses, used to be the seafarers' quarter and is now home to artists and their studios right on the street. The MaCO is a highly original open-air museum concept created in 2008 by the K-LIVE street art festival. The concept is to curate the work of a guest artist every year. Surrounding a nerve centre where the statue La Mamma by Sétois artist Richard Di Rosa, the walls feature works by major street art figures such as M. Chat, Epsylon Point and C215.
Here again, the Tourist Office is very active and organises guided tours of the town. the theme of painted walls. Shopkeepers, restaurateurs and hoteliers are more than happy to play the art game and promote avant-garde artists, either by exhibiting a few works they have bought, as at the Orque Bleue hotel, or by organising exhibitions, as at the Grand Hôtel de Sète. Almost as the bistrotiers of Montmartre used to do when they accepted artists' paintings in exchange for a few glasses of wine or absinthe.
Collioure: Montmartre with a Catalan accent
And this spirit of the Butte at the beginning of the 20th century is to be found a little further down the map, in the Catalan CountryIn Collioure and at the restaurant-bar-hotel Les Templiers, where not an inch of wall, not a corridor, not a staircase is available. There are canvases everywhere, some signed and some not so signed, portraits and still lifes above all. There are 3,000 of them on display. So freely, in fact, that one night, seven Picassos, two Maillols and two Survages disappeared forever...
Strong light and clear shadows, a mineral landscape, the infinite blue of the Mediterranean: "Collioure is a beautiful country...". Signac, who came to paint there in 1887, advised Matisse to go there for inspiration in 1905. The link between the little port and the greatest artists of the 20th century had been forged.
The ceilings are low, the walls are lined with crimson moleskin banquettes, the tables are made of thick brown wood, the bar is a reproduction of a boat with a figurehead, and the owners are none other than the descendants of René Pous, who founded the establishment in 1925. A great lover of artAn unconditional friend of artists, whose turbulent nature he put up with, Monsieur Pous received just about everyone who held a paintbrush: Derain, Dufy, Maillol, Dali and, of course, Picasso, who stayed at the Templiers for several summers.
But why here? Why CollioureIs it because Matisse, captivated by the exceptional light, set up his easel in this small fishing port on the Côte Vermeille, almost on the Spanish border? Because in the spring of 1905, Matisse, captivated by the exceptional light of the place, set up his easel there before bringing in his friend Derain... And it was together, painting side by side, bursting their canvases with violent, almost garish colours, that they gave birth to Fauvism, a movement that would bring together for a few years a host of painters destined for posterity. Today, the town council is offering a Fauve trail featuring reproductions of the paintings in the very places where they were painted. In the process, you'll discover the village and its narrow streets criss-crossed by wisteria, its delightful harbour and two remarkable sites: the church of Notre-Dame-des-Anges and the 14th-century Château des rois de Majorque.
The two buildings stand in stark contrast to the rest of the village and its brightly-coloured houses, except perhaps for the interior of the church, which sparkles with all the gold of Spanish Baroque. At the end of the afternoon, after a visit to the Maison Roque where you can watch the delicate work of the anchoïeuses - anchovies, salted or in oil, are the speciality of the village - you will be rewarded with a tasting of Collioure and Banyuls wines raised under the sublime vaults of a former 13th-century church, the Dominican Cellar. Then it's back to the Templiers for a de rigueur aperitif. With a bit of luck, an evening will be improvised. And we'll sing. And dance. Just like the old days, when the nights were wild.
Also in this dossier: Occitanie: address book
